After work on Monday I line up at the bank of telephones to make a call. The wait is long, but at last I can punch in the number I’ve kept in my pocket all day. I hold my breath at the distant buzz of the dial tone.
“Hello?”
The first voice that responds is a machine’s. “This is a collect call from California State Women’s Prison at El Centro. Do you accept the charges?”
“Yes.”
I exhale at her answer.
The static of the machine voice fades, and she says, “This is Karen Shepard speaking.”
“Ms. Shepard, this is Clara Mattingly.”
“Ms. Mattingly! I’m delighted to hear from you. I was afraid you weren’t going to answer. I would love to come down to interview you, at a time convenient for you, of course.”
“Weekends are best. I’m not supposed to miss work.” I glance toward the officer watching me. “They have a lot of rules about visits, though. You have to have ID, and dress conservatively—”
“Yes, I know. I investigated all of that when I decided to interview you. I’ll come by this Saturday. I have all my questions prepared.”
“That’s fine,” I say, but I don’t like her presumptions. In almost twenty-five years I’ve never once given an interview, and I’m not sure what made this woman believe she would be the exception. I wouldn’t even grant one to Katie Rayburn, who seemed very sweet and told me she wanted to get to know my speech patterns and mannerisms so she could portray me sympathetically. Do it, Mona had advised me, and even then I wouldn’t. There was too much risk in believing I had some type of control when, in the end, I would have none.
“I’d like to do this as a trade,” I say.
“A trade?”
“Yes. I need information about my family and Ricky Rowan’s. Medical history in particular, but also genealogy, if you can find it. What countries our ancestors came from. I never found out about my father, and I’m sure I don’t know Ricky’s.” It’s occurred to me that Annemarie will inevitably ask this, and I don’t want to have to lie. I have enough lies to keep track of without adding unimportant ones to the mix.
There’s a long pause across the phone line. “I don’t generally exchange anything for interviews. I never want the accusation that I somehow paid for information.”
“Ms. Shepard, unless I’m misunderstanding, your job is research. I’m only asking you to share information I’m sure you’ve already gathered in the course of your work on the biography.”
She offers a small, one-note laugh. “I see. Well, I suppose I can pull that together.”
“You’ll have to mail it to me. I can’t accept paperwork in the visiting room.” I’m running out of time, so I speak quickly. “Why don’t you include some of your interview questions in the same envelope, and I’ll mail you my replies. I can be more candid that way than I could speaking aloud with other inmates around. I’m sure you understand.”
“Well, yes. All right. And if I have further questions, we can arrange a meeting.”
I agree to this arrangement and set the phone back in its cradle. I wonder if I should have asked Mona about this, but it doesn’t matter now. A life sentence is a life sentence, and all I can do is work within it.
My normal library day is every other Wednesday, which under ordinary circumstances is perfectly sufficient, but with my growing interest in all stories about Penelope Robbins I have had a hard time waiting. I am glad to see that the latest issue of People is still available, with the Robbins case as one of the three stories showcased on the cover. I lift it from the rack and leaf through its pages.
Looking over the photo spread in the center of the magazine—Penelope playing tennis at summer camp, posing in formalwear at her Prom, beaming beside her father at the Capitol building in Washington—it’s easy to remember girls like her. After my mother married Garrison Brand and we moved into his home, I attended school with girls just like her—wealthy and privileged, confident and athletic. Our Lady of Mercy catered to two groups. There were the middle-class children of members of the parish, who paid tuition at a discounted rate, and the children of the wealthy, whose parents lavished the school with donations and made sure their own offspring knew it. With my mother’s remarriage I moved from one tier to the other, but Garrison was not that kind of boor, and I was not that kind of princess. It made for a lonely four years.
Still, Penelope and I have one thing in common—that nothing in our backgrounds would have led anyone to guess we’d wind up in big, big trouble with the law. Most of the people around me—not all, but most—landed here after years of substance abuse, domestic violence, or desperation to pay the bills. Many scrabbled for a solid grip on adulthood after a childhood wrenched by neglect and failed to find a handhold. But there’s always something, I’ve found. People don’t stumble into felony charges like tripping off a curb while hailing a cab. Whether or not others can see it, whether or not the inmate will admit to it, there’s always a reason why that woman turned.
The working theory about Penelope, I read, is that she hired the hit man to kill her father after a series of family arguments about her boyfriend—the dark-skinned young football player whose face I saw on the news. Her father, conservative and not known for his progressive views on race, forbade them from seeing each other. Being nineteen, she continued to see him anyway, and her father’s censure enraged her. Bank records show that she withdrew $20,000 from her trust fund account in the two weeks leading up to the shooting. Now her father lies on a respirator in a hospital in Sacramento, lingering in a vegetative state that may or may not be permanent, attended to by a fiancée not much older than his daughter. Penelope has hired a team of excellent lawyers, but even they couldn’t get her released on the obstruction of justice charge.
I gaze down at the largest picture of her—a coy-looking portrait featuring powdered skin and red lipstick, appearing to have been taken with the camera at arm’s length and turned around. Photo: Facebook, the credit reads. My theory—and I’m eager to follow the case and discover whether it’s true—is a sordid one indeed, but I’d put money on it if I had any. Father’s documented attraction to much younger women: check. Irrational dislike for her boyfriend: check. Habit of making a public show of his morals: check. It’s always the ones like him, after all, who eventually get caught with some young male intern or sending photographs of themselves dressed in women’s underwear over the internet. It’s always the ones neediest for respect and accolades who harbor the darkest secrets. In short, I believe Penelope is an incest victim, and if I’m right it’s no wonder she hired a hit man to put him out of his misery. I could hardly blame her.
I slide the magazine back onto the rack as Janny emerges from the stacks. Clutched in her hands are several romance novels, which she likes me to read to her in the evening. She hands me the pile. “I have a good feeling about these. What do they look like?”
I examine the covers. “Um, this one has a blonde woman and a dark-haired man kissing in front of a horse that’s rearing up. The next one has a bare-chested guy in a kilt. I guess it’s set in Scotland. And the last one is two people standing in front of a fireplace, cuddling. It’s called Snowbound Magic.”
“Ooh, I want that one. Anything with snow in it, that sounds fun.”
Her face is animated, eager. I take her elbow, and together we walk slowly to the front desk, where the librarian writes down our titles under each of our names. “I got one about snow,” Janny says to Ms. Chandler, our prison librarian. “Love in the snow. Gonna make me feel nice and cool when they turn off the A/C in the cellblock.”