Three months and seventeen days.
CHAPTER 6
Fourteen Months Later
Tuesday, July 16
3:20 P.M.
LAS PIERNAS
CALEB had learned to stop asking himself if it could get any worse. It could. It did.
In just a moment, it would get worse again.
The jury had reached a verdict, they had been told, and now everyone but the jury had crowded back into the courtroom. His brother-Mason Delacroix Fletcher, the defendant-and the attorneys and the judge had taken their places. The jury would come in soon, and this nightmare would enter its next phase.
Caleb sat to the left of his mother in the hot and stuffy courtroom. She swayed against him, leaned her head against his shoulder. He was easily a head taller than her. He worried that she might feel faint, and put an arm around her shoulders to steady her. She trembled. He felt her quiver, grow still, quiver again, felt the fear course through her in strange, arrhythmic waves. He reached across with his left hand and took her right, as if somehow he could shield her from the watching eyes, the cameras. Her hand was ice cold. She held so tightly to him, he thought she might break his fingers.
She was not a weak woman. Elisa Delacroix Fletcher had surprised those who had seemingly watched her every move over the last year. Maybe they didn’t understand what it took for a teenaged mother to raise a child alone, as she had Mason until she met Caleb’s dad. No one who was weak could survive what she did before she turned twenty-one.
Maybe the television commentators had expected his mother to be unable to go on after losing a husband and daughter under such horrible circumstances. Perhaps her appearance had fooled them-she was pale and almost waiflike-but anyone in her family could have told them there was determination and courage to be seen on a closer look. Trouble was, there were too few members of her family left. Her parents didn’t count, Caleb decided, refusing to acknowledge Grandmother Delacroix’s attempt to catch his eye. Unforgivably, they sat on the other side of the courtroom. They had never looked upon Mason as anything but a source of shame, which in turn made Caleb feel ashamed of being related to them.
Nelson Fletcher sat there, too, behind the Delacroixes and next to Caleb’s other grandfather, Graydon Fletcher. A dozen of Richard Fletcher’s other foster siblings were in attendance as well, “aunts” and “uncles” Caleb barely knew. A few of them had attended throughout the trial.
What a jumbled-up family they all were, anyway, he thought. Caleb’s father hadn’t been related by blood to Uncle Nelson or any of the others. Richard and Nelson had grown up together in a foster home, two of twenty-one children taken under the wing of the famously selfless Fletchers.
Caleb stole a glance at Grandfather Fletcher. The old man was impeccably dressed, as always. Caleb was not especially close to him, but he still felt admiration for him.
Caleb’s family hadn’t visited Grandfather Fletcher more than once or twice after his grandmother died, and not at all in recent years. Although he thought he understood the reasons his dad had wanted to be independent of the family’s influence-his dad thought they got into one another’s business way too much, and were kind of like a cult-Caleb felt bad about that distance now. They didn’t know Mason, so why should they doubt his guilt?
As if he had felt Caleb’s attention, Grandfather Fletcher turned and looked at him, and gave a little nod in his direction.
Caleb nodded back, wishing that somehow there had been no need for people to feel that they must take sides. If Grandfather Fletcher believed whatever Uncle Nelson told him about Mason, Caleb couldn’t blame him for that.
The press loved to talk about the “tragic irony,” of course. A man who was an orphan gets a lucky break and grows up in a great foster home. Becomes a successful graphic artist. Marries a woman who is struggling as a young single mother. Adopts her five-year-old boy. Loves and cares for him, and has two other children with her. And the ungrateful boy he adopted, Mason, returns his loving care by allegedly murdering him and his youngest child. Little Jenny.
If there was one word members of the press didn’t mean when they said it, that word was allegedly. But Caleb didn’t believe any of the charges against Mason. Mason might have argued a lot with his dad, but he loved him. And he would never, ever harm Jenny. Mason said that he could not remember anything between a party with some friends the night before the murder and waking up in the hospital almost two days later. His friends vouched for him, and said he had not been drinking, but they had, and admitted their own recollections of the evening weren’t all that clear. Caleb believed someone had set his brother up, but who-and why?
At first, Caleb had considered calling Detective Harriman about it. But Caleb didn’t really have any ideas to offer the police, and couldn’t explain away the evidence in any satisfactory way. DNA evidence. A bottle of scotch taken from his father’s office. A trophy his father had won in a design competition-the murder weapon.
Caleb and his mom had a great many other worries by then, too. The relief of Mason being found, the fear that he would die in those first chancy hours after he was discovered, the growing terror over Jenny, the shock of Mason’s arrest-all compounded their grief over his father’s death. The many arrangements to be made in the wake of his father’s death occupied them as well.
His dad’s business had become almost immediately worthless, since it depended entirely on his father’s talents. Fortunately, there was insurance coverage that allowed outstanding debts to be settled and the return of fees on contracts that would now never be completed. Nothing to speak of was left in assets.
Richard Fletcher’s personal life insurance policy and other investments were intended to pay off the house and studio mortgages, and to leave enough for the rest of the family to live on for a couple of years-or would have, if it had not been necessary to hire a criminal defense attorney.
Caleb didn’t believe that Mason would ever hurt his father or Jenny, but his reasons for believing Mason was being framed went beyond brotherly faith. When Caleb mentioned them to Mason’s attorney, though, the man shuddered and asked him to please not talk to anyone else about his brother’s “former” drug and alcohol problems. When Caleb said that he thought the attorney should talk to Detective Harriman, he got a long lecture about the police not being their friends, and was strictly forbidden from having any contact with the detective.
Caleb didn’t like the attorney his mother had chosen, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that. The man seemed to make an honest effort at defending Mason, which wasn’t easy, given the prosecution’s case.
Two clients, partners in a firm that had hired Richard Fletcher, testified that the day before Richard’s death they had overheard Mason Fletcher in a violent argument with the victim.
His mom wanted to testify that Richard Fletcher obviously hadn’t thought much of this argument, because he hadn’t mentioned it to her that evening, their last together. But the defense attorney decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to put her on the stand, fearing other questions about Mason the prosecutor might ask.
She had been strong throughout the ordeal of this trial. Most of the time, anyway. She had a bad moment when the prosecution showed the jury the oversized photographs of the fatal damage done to Richard Fletcher. Another when they showed the photographs of Jenny Fletcher-alive and well in those photos, three years old then, almost four. A reminder that none of them knew if she was alive or dead. He refused to believe she was dead, no matter what the prosecutors said. She was just five now-her birthdays had been terrible, grief-filled days for Caleb, Mason, and their mother. Did Jenny miss them?
That was the most innocent question he could ask himself about Jenny.