Black-Eyed Susans (31 page)

The thunderous noise drowns out Gloria
shouting into her bullhorn and the hymn of the women, whose mouths continue to open and
close like hungry birds.

The Blue Knights are revving their
motorcycles in unison, so he can hear.

Kill him.

MR. VEGA
: Will you please
state your full name for the record?

MR. BOYD
: Ural Russell Boyd.
People call me You-All. Ever since I played basketball in high school. The cheerleaders
turned it into one of their yells.

MR. VEGA
: How would you like
me to address you today?

MR. BOYD
: You-All’s
fine. I’m a little nervous.

MR. VEGA
: No need to be
nervous. You’re doing just fine. You own four hundred acres of land approximately
fifteen miles northwest of Fort Worth, correct?

MR. BOYD
: Yes, sir. In my
family for sixty years. But everybody still calls it the Jenkins property.

MR. VEGA
: Will you please
tell us what happened on the morning of June 23, 1994?

MR. BOYD
:
Yes, sir. My hound dog went missing. We were supposed to go bird hunting that morning
real early. When I couldn’t find him, I set out with Ramona.

MR. LINCOLN
: Ramona is
…?

MR. BOYD
: My
daughter’s horse. Ramona was the most in the mood for a ride that morning.

MR. LINCOLN
: And what
happened after that?

MR. BOYD
: Almost right away
I heard Harley start to howl near the west pasture. I thought maybe he met a copperhead.
I’ve had some problems with copperheads.

MR. VEGA
: You followed his
howl?

MR. BOYD
: Yes, sir. Once he
started he wouldn’t stop. I think he felt the vibration of Ramona’s hooves
and could feel us coming. He’s a real smart dog.

MR. LINCOLN
: Approximately
what time was this?

MR. BOYD
: About 4:30
A.M.

MR. LINCOLN
: How long did it
take to find Harley?

MR. BOYD
: Ten minutes. It
was dark. He was at the far corner of the property, about a half-mile off the highway.
He was keeping watch.

MR. VEGA
: What was he
keeping watch over?

MR. BOYD
: Two dead girls. I
didn’t know that the one girl was alive. She didn’t look alive.

MR. VEGA
:
Will you please describe to the jury exactly what you saw when you came upon the
grave?

MR. BOYD
: First, I flashed
my light on Harley. He was flat down in a bunch of flowers in a ditch. He didn’t
move. I didn’t see the hand at first because his nose was lying on it. I knew it
was a girl’s hand because of the blue fingernail polish. Sir, I’d like to
take a minute.

MR. VEGA
: Certainly.

MR. BOYD
: (inaudible)

MR. VEGA
: Take all the time
you need.

MR. BOYD
: It was a bad
moment. My daughter picks those flowers all the time. I hadn’t checked her bed
before I left the house.

While Bill and I waited for Manuel Abel
Gutierrez to die, a light freezing rain had transformed the highway home into a ribbon
of glistening ice. It’s the kind of storm that Yankees make fun of on Facebook
with a picture of a spilled cup of ice on the sidewalk that shuts down schools or a
cartoon that depicts massive car pileups with one culprit snowflake. It would be funny,
if a tenth of an inch of ice in Texas wasn’t deadly.

Bill had announced six minutes onto I-45
that he wasn’t about to skate the four-hour trek back, and swung the car around.
So here we are, locked in a Victorian ice castle two blocks from the death chamber and
its dissipating cloud. We were lucky that Mrs. Munson, the eighty-seven-year-old B&B
proprietor, picked up her phone at 11:26
P.M.
Every other hotel that
lined the highway was booked solid, their parking lots crammed with cars frosted like
petits fours.

Bill is running the water in his bathroom.
The sound rushes through the wall and under the one-inch gap beneath the connecting
door. Mrs. Munson had called up to us three times as we climbed the stairs to say that
the whole house was replumbed and wired with central heat, as if we might not understand
the $300 price tag per room. I bounce lightly on the bed, running my fingers over the
path
of tiny stitches of red and yellow tulip quilt. I want to tell
Mrs. Munson that her accommodations are worth every penny.

Lydia would love this room with the cheery
lemon walls and the grim faces of dead people staring off the dresser. The iron lamp
with a gold-fringed shade that glows like a tiny fire. The ice chips clicking against
the window, chattering teeth.

She would lie on this bed and construct a
doomed romance for the gauzy antique wedding dress that hangs like a ghost in the
half-open wardrobe, and a more terrifying tale about the door to another dimension that
hides in the shadows behind it. Maybe she’d combine the stories into one. This
night would race ahead, a splendid, radiant adventure. We would be girls again, before
monsters and devastating words, our imaginations locked together.

There’s a short knock on the
connecting door.

“Come on in, Bill,” I say
immediately.

Bill hesitates on the threshold, dressed in
jeans and a T-shirt that must have been hidden under his button-down. “I found
toothbrushes in a cabinet in my bathroom. Want one?” I slide off the bed and walk
over.

“Thanks.” I pick blue over
yellow. “I could use a glass of wine, too. Maybe a shot of tequila.”

“I don’t think that’s
stocked in the bathroom cabinet. I’m getting a bottle of water from the little
fridge in the hall. Want one?”

“Sure.”

He disappears into his room before I can
tell him to use my door to the outside hall. We are being so very polite. Earlier
tonight, before we headed to the execution, Bill had punched a button on his computer
and officially filed Terrell’s habeas corpus appeal with the federal court. It
emphasizes the “junk science” DNA results on the red hair, the overwhelming
statistics on faulty witness ID, and a statement from me, the living victim who thinks
the real Black-Eyed Susan killer might still be stalking her and is willing to testify
to it.

No mention of mysterious black-eyed Susan
plantings or a
buried book of Poe in Lydia’s back yard or a
tooth in an old U-Haul box.

I have wished, more than once, that I had
kept the sick piece of poetry I found under my tree house instead of ripping it to
shreds and throwing away the pill bottle it came in. It might have been impossible to
retrieve DNA or fingerprints from the paper or plastic all these years later, but it was
tangible proof that I wasn’t making it up.

Bill’s habeas petition is far short of
what he wanted to file at this point, but he is hoping it is enough for the judge to
grant a hearing. He’s hoping that Jo will shake more loose from the bones in the
meantime.

“Here you go,” Bill says.
“I see you’ve got cable TV, too. It’s just a little hard to see around
these tree trunk bedposts. Did you reach Lucas?”

“It’s all good. He’s got
it covered. Charlie’s asleep.”

“Can I sit down for a
second?”

“Sure.”

He pulls the straight-back chair from beside
the dresser and sits on a needlepointed seat of roses. I reassume my position on the
corner of the bed.

“You asked the other day if
there’s hope,” Bill says. “After today … I just think it’s
better if I’m honest. I think it is likely that Terrell is going to die.
He’s on a runaway train. I know today was tough. Meeting Terrell. The execution.
It doesn’t matter how you feel about the death penalty. I was all for the death
penalty five years ago and it’s just as fucking grim either way.”

I’m stunned by this admission. I had
never imagined him with a single doubt.

“Two things happened for me to change
my mind. The duh lawyer moment when I realized that you’re never going to find a
rich white guy on that gurney. And the Angie moment. She made me get to know a couple of
guys on Death Row. Guilty ones, like a guy who broke in to a back yard high on meth and
shot an elderly woman
sitting in the garden in her wheelchair, so he
could run inside and steal her purse. Angie didn’t think I could do this job to
her satisfaction until I understood that it wasn’t just about proving innocence.
That I needed to be all in. To understand that men on Death Row were human beings who
did horrible things but that didn’t mean
they
were horrible things. The
men that I’ve met who are sitting on Death Row are not the same men who committed
those crimes. They are sober. Born again. Repentant. Or bat-shit crazy.” He eases
back in the chair. “Occasionally, but not often, innocent.”

I wonder how long he’s been holding in
this speech and why he chose tonight to give it. “I don’t know where I am on
the death penalty,” I say. “I’m just … not … there.”
I have promises to keep.

“And Terrell?”

“I can’t talk about
Terrell.”

He nods. “I’ll let you get some
sleep.”

As soon as he shuts the door between us,
I’m desperate to wash away everything about this day. I enter a bathroom both
bygone and modernly appointed, strip off all of my clothes, and lay them on the counter.
I dread putting them on in the morning. They’re tainted by death. But I’d
brought nothing else in my backpack—just a couple of PowerBars, a water bottle, a
spool of silk thread and needles for an experiment in lace-making. And, at the last
minute, I’d tossed the testimony inside, mostly in case Bill asked if I’d
read it. I hadn’t. I’d opened the envelope, pulled out the papers, and stuck
them right back in.

I push aside the shower curtain and crank
the knob. The hot water responds, silky, hot, and immediate. I wash everything three
times before stepping onto slick white subway tile and reluctantly tugging on the
day’s underwear and a white cotton tank that had been my ineffective effort at
winter layering. I towel-dry my hair into a frenzy of curls, too exhausted to use the
expensive ceramic blow dryer on the counter.

I slip into chilly sheets, shivering, trying
not to think about the
grieving mother who raced to a morgue tonight.
Who hoped, for the first time in years, to touch the body of her son, a killer, while it
was still warm.

At 4:02
A.M.
, my eyes pop
open. I’m gasping for breath as if someone just snatched a pillow from my
face.

Lydia.

Cool light streams through the windows. The
winter storm, asleep. My mind, racing.

To Charlie, safe at home, tangled in her
comforter. I picture her breathing softly, in and out, and I breathe in rhythm with her.
To Lydia, holding the paper bag to my face after a race, telling me to
breathe,
and I do. In and out.

Lydia, Lydia, Lydia.
She’s
invaded this room. The old Lydia, who checked my pulse, and the other one, who is
scratching to get out of Bill’s envelope in my backpack.

Did I just miss the clues? Or are all of
us just one betrayal, even one sentence, away from never speaking to each other
again?
I always, always defended my best friend. Even Granddaddy, a fan of her
rabid imagination, wasn’t completely sure.

He asked once: “What do you see in
Lydia?”

“She’s like no one else,”
I had replied, a little defensively. “And loyal.”

She changed in the month before the trial.
The old Lydia made fun of the push-up Wonderbra. She stuck her hands under her breasts,
arranged them into little mountains and mocked the Eva Herzigova billboards.
Look me
in the eyes and tell me that you love me.
She cocked her knee, planted her
hands on her hips, thrust out her chest, and drawled:
Who cares if it’s a bad
hair day?

The new Lydia
bought
a Wonderbra
and strapped it on. She complained that all high school boys wanted was a blank slate to
draw their pencil on. Her grades dipped into the A minuses. She renounced Dr Peppers and
Sonic cheese tots, and worst of all, she stopped her
incessant,
encyclopedic chatter. I knew I should press her, but I was trapped in my own head.

Old Lydia kept all of my secrets.

New Lydia told my secrets to the world.

I’m standing over his bed. The covers
are a rumpled drift, like snow is falling through the ceiling. Bill is facing the other
way. His body, rising and falling, slow and steady.

It isn’t like me to do this,
I think, as I shed my T-shirt and it falls soundlessly to the floor. I don’t play
games. I’m not impulsive.
I’m not that girl.
I lift up the quilt
and slide in. Press my bare skin against the heat of his back. His breathing stills. He
waits pregnant seconds before turning over to face me. He’s left a few inches of
distance between us.

“Hey,” he says. It’s too
dark to read his expression.

This was a mistake,
I think.
He’s already mentally moved on. He’s reaching out now to push me away.

Instead, his finger travels my cheek, the
side without the scar. I’m suddenly aware that my face is wet.

“You OK?” His voice, husky.
He’s being chivalrous, offering me a last chance to escape, even as I make a naked
present of myself in his bed.

“I’m not that kind of
girl.” I lean in. Drift my tongue along his ear.

“Thank God,” he replies, and
tugs me to him.

A bird’s distress call slices the
silence and jars me awake. It’s a high-pitched plea from a branch by the window.
Why is my world frozen? Where did everybody go?