On the street side of the pier, the Chatham Fire Chief waits in his official truck, heater running and red lights ablaze, to serve as Santa’s surrogate chauffeur. The reindeer, we’ve always been told by town selectmen, are busy elsewhere. After all, they explain each year, some children don’t live in Chatham. Someone has to deliver their toys.
Every year, Santa and the Fire Chief lead a caravan from the Fish Pier to the Main Street Elementary School, where the Cape Cod Carolers and the Chatham Band greet one and all with holiday music, home-baked cookies, and mulled cider. There, Santa sits enthroned on the gymnasium stage, chatting leisurely with every good boy and girl in town. The naughty ones usually stop by for a few words as well.
When Luke was little, he worried about the rest of the world’s children. Who visits them, he wondered, if Santa spends all of Christmas Eve-every Christmas Eve-with us? Helpers, I told him. Santa has thousands of helpers, and many of them look remarkably like him. The real Santa, I said, would just rather spend Christmas Eve in Chatham. That explanation made perfect sense to my son, for more years than he now cares to admit.
Luke and his friends still attend the Christmas Eve festivities each year. They stay until the last cookie is gone, then head out to a movie, an annual tradition of sorts. This year Maggie plans to join them. Luke actually invited her, she told me breathlessly this morning. When Luke got into the car, though, she acted as if the evening plans had all but slipped her mind. She’s good, that Maggie.
She’s not happy with me at the moment. She and Luke appeared in the courtroom’s back row at five, expecting we’d all head to Chatham and the Fish Pier shortly thereafter. It didn’t work out, of course. It’s almost eight now. Santa and his entourage are well into the festivities at the elementary school. And the baked goods are almost certainly gone.
“Can we please get out of here?” Luke drapes one arm across his forehead, to show me how gravely he suffers, as he and Maggie approach the defense table.
My plan was to drive them to Chatham, then return to the courthouse to await the verdict or, more likely, the jurors’ departure for their hotel rooms. That way I’d have the car. Luke and Maggie can hitch rides with any number of Luke’s friends.
Inherent in my plan, though, was an expectation that Harry would sit here, at the defense table, while I was gone. It doesn’t seem right to leave our table unmanned. Especially not with Stanley entrenched at his.
The Kydd returns to the courtroom grinning. I can’t imagine what he finds funny. He crosses the front of the room, drops into the chair next to mine, and laughs. “He wants to stay.”
“What?”
“Harry. He wants to stay.”
“Stay where?”
“In lockup. He doesn’t want us to get him out. Doesn’t even want us to try.”
Sometimes I think Harry’s been ensconced in the underworld too long, needs a new set of friends, maybe.
“He says if this thing goes the wrong way, if Buck’s convicted, the judge’s bias will make a decent appealable issue. We’ll argue ol’ Beatrice had a conflict of interest-a huge one-and she should have recused herself at the outset. With that argument in mind, he says, the longer he spends locked up, the better.”
Sometimes I think Harry’s pretty damn smart.
The Kydd laughs again. “He also says he’s beat. He told me to get lost. Says he could use a few hours sleep. And the county’s accommodations are fine with him. There’s no phone, it’s quiet, and the cots are comfortable.”
And sometimes I think Harry’s certifiable.
“Can we please get out of here?” Luke repeats his plea, complete with arm drama.
“Go ahead,” the Kydd says. “I’ll stay.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.” The Kydd taps the phone in his jacket pocket.
“I’ll call you if there’s even a peep.”
“Okay.”
Luke and Maggie dash for the back door.
“I shouldn’t be gone much more than an hour,” I tell the Kydd as I zip up my parka. “I’ll just drop them off.”
“Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”
The gallery is all but empty as I head down the center aisle. Only one spectator remains: Patty Hammond. She traded her front-row seat for the back bench, where the lighting is dim. She looks concerned as I approach. Of course she is. One of Buck’s lawyers is in jail. And the other one is leaving.
“I’ll be back,” I tell her.
She looks only slightly relieved.
“I’m taking Luke and Maggie to Chatham, to the elementary school.”
Her face changes, collapses a little. Relief turns into a different emotion. Pain, maybe. Physical pain.
She stares into her lap for a moment, then looks back up at me, her eyes moist.
Physical pain it is. Billy should be at the elementary school tonight. No doubt he was there last year.
“Why don’t you come with us?”
“To Chatham?” Patty looks as if our hometown might be somewhere on the West Coast.
“We’ll be back in an hour. It’ll probably take the jury that long to elect a foreperson.”
She looks uncertain.
“Come on. Let’s get some fresh air. You can keep me awake on the ride back.”
“Okay,” she says, reaching for her coat.
Waiting for a verdict in any case is nerve-racking. In a murder trial, it’s an impossible combination of tedium and panic. The opportunity to do something useful with the time is irresistible. And I wasn’t kidding. Patty can keep me awake on the ride back. I’m exhausted. It’s been a long time since Opie and I visited Geraldine this morning.
The snow, it seems, will never end. Paths through the parking lot, apparently plowed out earlier in the day, are half filled again. Luke and Maggie wait by the locked Thunderbird, hoods up, their breath creating misty gray clouds amid the swirls of white snowflakes. Maggie dances by the back door to keep warm.
The old car starts without a problem, as it always does-a recurring miracle. In minutes, we’re traveling the back roads toward Chatham, the defrost and the heat at full blast, the radio silent. Christmas carols don’t feel quite right tonight, no matter what the calendar says. Again, there’s no moon. Inky blackness envelops us.
Patty turns in the seat beside me to face Maggie. “How’s your mom doing?”
That’s a question I should have asked. Add guilt to the menu of emotions I’m carrying around tonight.
“She’s okay.” Maggie leans forward, between Patty and me, and the dashboard lights illuminate her face. “She says it’s not too bad in there. She made a friend. One of the other ladies is real nice, Mom says. Her name is Cassie.”
“That’s good,” Patty tells her. “She needs a friend. We all do.”
“I want to go back tomorrow, see her on Christmas, if that’s okay with you, Marty. The guard ladies say it’s okay by them. And Luke says he’ll drive me.”
“Sounds like a plan.” I’m fairly certain I’ll be coming back myself, though, to pace the hallways and wait for Buck’s verdict.
“I have a present for her. A necklace. I know she won’t be allowed to wear it in there, but I want to show it to her anyhow.”
Presents. Double the guilt. Most years, Luke’s Christmas Eve schedule with his friends works out well for me and the presents problem. I shop until the last store locks its doors, then wrap till I drop. Not this year, though.
This year I have only a handful of packages for Luke. And half of those, the items that aren’t strictly male, I’ll cull out for Maggie. They’re small things, for the most part, trinkets I purchased during early fall, when the weather was conducive to strolling through Chatham Center and I was unemployed. The good old days.