For Good (20 page)

“Cross?” the judge asked when Kristen was done.

On the desk before Kristen, her phone lit up with a silent plea. She glanced at the number. There were only four area codes in Oregon. Five-four-one could have been anywhere outside of Portland, but the sudden twist in her stomach told her no. Kristen stood up, touching
accept
without putting the phone to her ear.

“Your Honor, may I have a five-minute recess?” she asked.

Donna glared at her.
What?
she mouthed.

“Three minutes,” the judge said.

Kristen heard the courtroom murmur behind her as she walked out.

An automated voice on the other end of the line asked her if she would accept a collect call from an inmate at Holten Penitentiary.

“Yes,” Kristen said.

A second later, Marydale came on the line.

“I'm in court. I've got three minutes,” Kristen said.

Marydale gasped.

“What is it?” Kristen asked.

She hurried down the hallway, past the information desk, and out onto the street. The trees had leafed, and sun dappled the sidewalk, but Kristen couldn't feel its warmth.

Marydale was sobbing.

“Slow down,” Kristen said. “I can't understand you.”

For a second, Marydale was silent. She seemed to have expended all her breath and could not draw in another one.

“She tried to fight me,” Marydale finally managed. “I'm never going to get out. I can't do this.”

“Are you hurt? What happened?” Kristen asked.

“She doesn't want to hurt me. She's working with him, or at least she says she is. She thinks she is. She'd do it for commissary. They add time for bad behavior. I'll get charged. She'll tell the guards I hit her. I saw her cut herself with a shiv once, just to put another girl away. The girl got criminal charges. It added years to her sentence.”

“Slow down, Mary.” Kristen had never used the diminutive Aldean called Marydale, but now it felt like the only word that could calm the torrent of Marydale's speech. “Who are you talking about? Who's doing this? Talk to me, Mary.”

Marydale started to cry again. “Gulu always said once you go in, you're always in,” she sobbed. “You never get out. She's in for life. This is her whole world. She said Ronald Holten missed me. Gulu's got nothing to lose, Kristen. Whatever they tell you, I didn't do it. She'll plant drugs on me. She'll find a way to make it real. They'll believe her. You'll believe her. Kristen, I can't—”

“Kristen!” Donna had appeared at the end of the block and was hurrying toward her. “What are you doing?” She waved a skinny arm across her chest in angry semaphore. “We're in court!”

Kristen checked her watch. The three minutes were long gone. Inside, the fate of USA DataBlast hung in meaningless balance. If she won, the CEOs would parachute to safety. The plaintiffs would get checks for odd, useless sums of money. Twenty-nine cents. Nine dollars and one penny. The DataBlast staff would be absorbed into Tri-State Global or not. Some would quit. Others would collect unemployment. Only the color of the cubicles would change. And she would be made partner, and the Falcon Law Group would pay for an ad in the bar bulletin, a full-color photograph of Kristen standing in front of the Portland skyline, her hand on the corner of her desk.
Welcoming our newest partner to the Falcon legacy.

“Mary, listen.”

Kristen was going to say,
I'll be there soon, as soon as I finish with DataBlast. I'll
rush the case.

Donna was talking over her. “What are you doing? You have to get back in there. Everyone is waiting for you.”

Kristen watched her gesturing. She heard Marydale breathing heavily on the other end of the phone, trying to contain her sobs. She felt the sunlight filtering through the new spring leaves.

“I will be there tonight,” Kristen said. “I will see you tonight. They have to let you talk to your lawyer. I will be there.”

“Where the hell are you going?” Donna demanded as Kristen pocketed her phone.

“You're a good attorney, Donna,” Kristen said. “No, you're a great attorney.”

“What are you doing?”

“I have to go.”

“You can't do this to me.” Donna cut sharp swaths of air as she gestured. “I put you up for partner. That's my reputation on the line.”

“You know this case as well as I do.”

“Tri-State Global doesn't want the Falcon Law Group. They want you.”

 “Tri-State Global is a company. They don't want things.” It sounded like something Sierra would say. “This doesn't matter.”

“If you want to work for Falcon Law,
it matters
!” Donna brushed her bangs out of her eyes.

“I'm sorry.” Kristen turned.

“You're making a mistake.”

“I already made a mistake,” Kristen said, “a long time ago.”

Marydale returned to her cell while the other prisoners exercised in the yard. She asked the guard for a book, but he just laughed.

“I'll tell room service,” he said, and closed the bars behind her.

Marydale climbed up onto her bunk and closed her eyes. There was a trick to prison, a kind of half sleep that made the hours pass. She tried to remember the exact details of the distillery, the copper-batch still, the fermenting tanks, and the bottling station. They were almost ready to bottle the Solstice Vanilla. Aldean would say it tasted too soft,
a girl's whiskey
. She tried to cork the bottles in her mind. Aldean would fill. She would insert the stopper with the Sadfire logo facing the label, pull a strip of sealing tape over the top, polish the bottle, place it in a crate. She went through the process again.

She was almost asleep when she heard Gulu whisper,
Scholar, we missed you.
She couldn't tell if it was a real voice or if Gulu was calling to her from another part of the prison. She might be only a few feet away in the cell above Marydale's, or she could be at the far end of the block or outside. Marydale felt like she could hear everything. The guards laughing. The zip of a folded note being whisked from cell to cell on a thread. The air-handling system. Sometimes she thought she could hear cars on the road outside the prison, but she knew it couldn't be true. She tried to focus on the imaginary bottles, to blot out everything else, but the harder she tried, the more she heard Gulu's voice in her head.
She's not coming, Scholar. You're never getting out of here.

“Get up, Rae.”

The other women were coming back from the yard, but the guard outside her cell wasn't looking for them.

“I'm guessing you won't mind a field trip.” It was one of the older guards, a skinny man with silver hair. He was the kind of guard who had to keep order with a calm word and a look not his bulk or his boom. Marydale liked him as much as she could like anything in Holten. “You got a visitor. Hurry up,” he said. “It's almost count. Don't keep everyone waiting.”

She struggled to her feet. The guard let her out of her cell. Walking down the central hall, Marydale looked for Gulu without turning her head. A moment later, she was in a small conference room with a little table and two chairs.

The guard took a pair of handcuffs out of a pocket in his uniform. “Sorry,” he said.

A window in the door faced the corridor outside, and Marydale caught her reflection in its glass. The skin beneath her eyes looked bruised. Her hair hung limp. She tried to brush it with her fingers, but the handcuffs hampered her movements. She pinched her cheek to bring a little color into her face and heard her mother's voice.
A girl can always do something.

The air felt close. She could hear the hands of a clock ticking somewhere in the hallway. Deep inside the building she heard a siren start up, like the angry wail of a business alarm in some rundown strip mall. On and on it blared, until it became a part of the silence itself, and she wondered if it had been sounding since she arrived at Holten.

Finally, the door opened, and Marydale released a breath she didn't realize she'd been holding. It was Kristen, led by the silver-haired guard.

Kristen looked beautiful, her blouse buttoned to the top button, her double-breasted blazer almost military in its precision. Marydale wanted to weep, and she wanted to fall at Kristen's feet and cling to her knees and beg,
Love me.

“Are the handcuffs really necessary?” Kristen asked the guard, her voice cool and professional.

“It's a precaution.”

“Is it a requirement?”

“Not strictly.”

“Then I'd like you to remove them, please. We've got a lot of paperwork to go through. It'll be easier.”

The guard withdrew a metal lanyard from his pants pocket and unlocked the cuffs. Marydale rubbed her wrists, her eyes following the guard as he closed the door behind them. The lock clicked into place, and they stared at each other.

“I…” Marydale began. “What about DataBlast? Aren't you supposed to be in court?”

“It's taken care of.”

Marydale glanced around the tiny room. She drew in a breath to say something, but words escaped her.

“Come on,” Kristen went on. “Let's talk about your case.”

Marydale recounted her arrest, Holten's arrival, and her fight with Gulu.

“Ronald Holten. The director of parole.” Kristen's face was calm, but her hand was clamped in a fist. “I've found an administrative rule against a victim's family member overseeing a parolee, and I've written to the parole board and called them. I'm waiting to hear back. We'll sue if we have to.”

“He hates me,” Marydale said. “I guess he should.”

“No,” Kristen said. “He shouldn't. No one should.”

“I did it,” Marydale said quietly.

“It was self-defense. Why didn't you appeal at the time?”

“Eric, my lawyer, he said I wouldn't win an appeal. I trusted him. Why would he lie? How could all those people on the jury be wrong?” She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “I understand that I had a right to do what I did because Aaron was going to hurt me, but back then….” She drew in a shuddering breath. “I always tried to make the best of everything. I don't know how I can do that now. Gulu's going to hang me.” She covered her mouth. She felt the room closing in on her. Gulu would get another inmate to say Marydale had touched her. Gulu would fashion a little packet of baking soda cut with just enough cocaine to test positive…

Kristen leaned forward. “We're going to get through this.”

“Everything gets so small in here.” Marydale was thinking of the little notes shuttling back and forth between the cells. They said nothing. A few expletives. A curse against the guards. Marydale closed her eyes.

“I walked out of court,” Kristen said.

Marydale's eyes flew open. “What?”

She reached across the table and grabbed Kristen's hands.

“I drove straight over,” Kristen said. “I had to see you. I told Donna to finish DataBlast.”

“But you were going to make partner.”

Kristen glanced over her shoulder at the narrow window in the door behind her. She squeezed Marydale's hands and then let go.

“I'm not leaving Tristess until I leave with you. I'll think of something, and if you have to stay here, this time I'll stay, too.”

The next days passed in a blur, both frantic and interminable. Kristen moved back into the Almost Home. The pool was still empty. Most of the rooms around her were still vacant. But someone had redecorated her room. The orange bedspread had been replaced by a purple comforter, and the cowboy prints had been replaced with Asian mountain scenes. The woman behind the counter was Indian and wore the red bindi between her brows. Kristen wondered briefly what her life was like in Tristess. Was she an outsider like Marydale had been? And if so, why did she stay? But it didn't matter how the hotel room was decorated; Kristen longed to be in her own bed in Portland with Marydale curled against her side.

On her third day in Tristess, Kristen called Doug Grady's office, surprised to find that he was still practicing law, still the only defense attorney in town. He met her for lunch at the Heavenly Harvest, the new incarnation of the Ro-Day-O.

“So you just walked out in the middle of your case?” Grady asked.

Outside the sky was a thin haze of unshed snow. The spring that had come to Portland had not reached the high desert. Grady twirled a strand of spaghetti around his fork, the delicate movement at odds with his large hands. His cream-colored suit was immaculate.

“My cocounsel was there,” Kristen said. “I called my sister, told her to take care of my dog, and left from downtown. I didn't even go home to pack.”

Grady put his fork down. “I always knew you had character.”

“You thought I was a bratty law student from the city,” Kristen said.

“You couldn't help that.” Grady dabbed at his lips. “I liked what I heard about you and Marydale. She needed a friend who wasn't part of this place. Is that why she moved to Portland?”

Kristen swirled the last drops of coffee around in her mug. “No. We lost touch…for a while.”

Grady nodded.

“I'm not going to let that happen again,” Kristen added. “She shouldn't be in Holten. She shouldn't even be on supervision.”

“Was she convicted under one of the lifetime supervision laws?”

“Yeah. It's not right. If she were dangerous, if she were violent…but she's not. I got a copy of her parole records. There was a two-year period where she was jailed at least six months out of twelve, and it was all for stupid stuff. She went to the Walmart in Harney County. She got a post office box without permission. Her
house
had been foreclosed on. She was living in a motel, and she got sanctioned for that, too, because she's not supposed to live with other felons, and some guy with a record was renting a room on the other side of the building. She couldn't win.”

“And then she got someone to transfer her to Portland,” Grady finished.

“She got a new PO, and she reported and paid her supervision fee. She did everything she was supposed to do, except the PO was supposed to transfer her supervision to an officer in Portland, and she didn't. Marydale didn't have a clean enough record to get a transfer, but she couldn't stay out of trouble in Tristess. I think she was just too unhappy, and the rules were stacked against her. She wasn't even supposed to date.”

“Did Marydale know it wasn't legit?”

Kristen pushed the salad around on her plate. “She knew.”

“And now Ronald Holten is in charge of parole,” Grady said. “Word on the street is his ranch is failing. People are starting to say he never was a rancher, just a moneylender. One of the grass-fed cooperatives even sued him over easements into BLM land. He'd been charging people thousands to run their herd over some pathetic little strip of land he owned all around the big Clear Creek parcel. Court said he could do that, but then they seized three mile-long sections. Condemnation via eminent domain. They said they needed to run some utility lines through those sections. Now all people have to do is divert the herd a half mile this way or that, and they're in for free.”

A waitress appeared at their side. Under her apron, she wore a T-shirt with the words
LIFE IS GOOD
printed across the front.

“For dessert we've got lemongrass gelato and rosemary-apricot pie,” she said.

“Gelato,” Grady grumbled. “What happened to chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry? Breyers was good enough for my dad. Things are changing around here.” He wiped the edge of the table with his napkin, then rested his elbows on the surface. “But it's going to be tough. Ronald Holten's going to say she didn't have permission to be in Portland. She's been on abscond. He'll make her stay, and he'll make her keep her nose clean.”

“By not letting her go to the grocery store…or date.” Kristen pushed her uneaten lunch aside and pulled out her tablet.

“What are you going to do?” Grady asked.

That was the question. Kristen tapped the surface of her tablet and the parole board website appeared on the screen. “I can help her petition for a transfer to Portland, and there'll be a hearing to determine how long she's in prison for this violation.”

 “But she doesn't deserve any of it.” Grady finished her thought for her.

“I've been looking into post-conviction relief. I know every felon tries for it, and it doesn't work, but this time I think it might. But here's the thing. I haven't talked to my boss yet, but I'm pretty sure I'm getting fired right about now.” Kristen could picture the meeting. Donna would speak first.
I recommend dismissal. The liability.
She would talk quickly, as though that would prevent the other partners from remembering that she had championed Kristen's promotion. “I don't have time to set up as a sole practitioner,” Kristen went on. “I need to practice under someone else's insurance.”

“Mine?”

“Yeah.”

“You come rolling in in whatever that is.” Grady glanced at Kristen's Audi in the parking lot outside the restaurant. “Big-city lawyer, going up against the Holtens. Do you know what that would do to my practice if people knew you were working out of my office?”

“You said things are changing.”

“We got fancy ice cream. It's not a revolution.”

“You said you moved back to Tristess so that what happened to Marydale didn't happen to anyone else.”

Grady steepled his fingers. “It's about time I pack up into the sunset anyway. You can practice under my insurance. We'll go back to my office and do the paperwork today, but tell me, what kind of law do you practice in Portland?”

“Class actions, mostly cell phone stuff and Web advertising.”

“That's what I thought. When's the last time you did criminal?”

“When I was here.”

“So maybe you don't know: the statute of limitations ran out on post-conviction relief. It's too late for Marydale.” There was no
gotcha
in Grady's expression. “I know because I looked into it when I came out here. It was too late then, too.”

Kristen sat back on her vinyl bench. She looked out the window. The name of the restaurant had changed, but the view was still the same: the Almost Home Motel with its empty swimming pool, its faded sign silhouetted against the sky. Beyond the motel, a procession of fast-food restaurants and payday loan shops marked a dozen dead ends.

“I thought life in the country was supposed to be beautiful,” Kristen said.

“Used to be. Still is sometimes, if you can get out of town.”

Kristen thought of Marydale in her thin orange uniform. “What do I do?”

“The only way you can get post-conviction relief now is if you find evidence that couldn't have been discovered at the time of the trial.”

“A unicorn,” Kristen said, not so much to Grady as to the window and the empty pool and the lane of predatory lenders.

“A fucking unicorn,” he agreed. “A goddamn fucking unicorn.”