For Good (23 page)

Marydale stood motionless, her legs spread, her muscles tight. Kristen felt her attention perfectly divided between Marydale's body and the sound of voices at the end of the hall. She listened, her fingers moving over Marydale, sliding up and down beside her clit, then dipping into her body, then rubbing quickly and lightly over her whole sex.

“Trust me, Marydale.” Kristen could feel Marydale's legs tremble. Kristen didn't dare kiss her, because she couldn't take her attention from the door, the hall, the sounds, the footsteps.

The footsteps! Suddenly they were close.

A guard said, “We'll need the room for Brosch.”

He was right outside the door. She could hear his keys. Kristen pulled away. Marydale looked as shaken as Kristen felt.

“They're coming,” Kristen hissed.

Marydale rushed for her seat, dropping into it as the guard appeared at the doorway. Kristen thought she could smell Marydale's sex in the air. Her hand was slick with moisture from Marydale's body, her face flushed, her breath ragged. Still, she had not clawed her way into the best law firm in Portland for nothing.

She turned slowly, as she would in court, knowing exactly how to pose.

“Yes?” she asked the guard who had appeared in the doorway. “I'm with my client.”

She knew in that instant they had staged the perfect tableau. The inmate slightly flustered, trying to guess the right answer to a question that had no solution. The attorney losing patience, starting to think about her next case, perhaps unnerved by being in a prison, but hiding it well. Their intimate distress translated into the awkward flush of strangers about uncomfortable business. Kristen turned her back to the guard.
We will win
, she mouthed. Marydale nodded, but Kristen couldn't tell if it was desire or defeat that darkened Marydale's eyes like the smoke from wildfires at night.

Kristen drove back to her motel and paced her room for an hour, then walked over to the Heavenly Harvest, where she was to meet Grady. She waited, staring out the window. Main Street looked even grimmer than the day before.
Lifetime supervision
, she thought.
Forever.
She had promised Marydale that they would win, but good attorneys knew never to make promises like that. She remembered her torts professor declaring,
The law is a blunt instrument
.
If you want justice, look to God. If you want rules, look to the law.

Grady slid into the booth across from her, interrupting her thoughts.

“City food!” He picked up a menu. “You probably like this stuff. What is
pecorino
anyway?”

“Cheese,” Kristen said wearily.

“Ah, it doesn't matter,” Grady amended. “What have you got on Marydale's case?”

“I told her we'd win.”

“You find something?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why'd you tell her…?”

“I can't let her lose again, but with Ronald Holten in charge of parole…” Kristen trailed off.

“This town,” Grady said.

A thin, early sun came through the windows, making Kristen's eyes water and casting long shadows across the table.

“How was she?” Grady asked.

Kristen thought of Marydale's hard, desperate kiss and the sadness in her eyes.

“She doesn't think she'll get out, and she probably won't. I lied to her. I couldn't look her in the eyes and tell her to give up hope,” Kristen said. “She was seventeen. It's not fair. Now she's stuck. If she gets a traffic ticket or a PO who doesn't like her, it's back to this.”

Across the street, Kristen saw Sierra exit one of the motel rooms. Somehow Moss, Frog, and Sierra managed to share a single room in perfect harmony, the men in one bed, Sierra in the other. They'd even decorated with a roll of Scotch tape and whatever maps and leaves and twigs they'd found in Tristess. It looked good in an odd, vegan co-op sort of way.

“How'd you come out the way you did and your sister…?” Grady asked.

Kristen squinted into the sun. Sierra had wrapped a green scarf around her dreadlocks. She had a drum slung over one shoulder and a laptop tucked under her arm. A second later, she burst through the door, waving at the hostess and sliding into the booth next to Kristen. She dropped the drum on floor with a resonant thud and opened her laptop.

“Look at this!” she said.

She whirled the screen around to show Kristen and Grady.

“It's your article about Marydale,” Kristen said.

“Look at the header.”

“You sent it to the
Oregonian
?” Kristen asked, noting the familiar script at the top of the screen.

“The Associated Press picked it up.”

“You're part of the AP?” Kristen asked.

Grady was watching Sierra like one might watch an interesting sea creature.

“It's gone viral.” Sierra hit a few keys. “Look at our website. We got more than thirty thousand hits. And look at the comments.” She pushed the computer back toward Kristen. “People love her. They get it!”

Kristen scanned the feed. There were a few of the usual Internet rants in all caps, but the majority of the comments were composed in full sentences and complete paragraphs. A man in Austin said his father had been imprisoned for being gay in the 1990s. A fifteen-year-old girl in Baltimore said she'd been sent to a juvenile detention center for six months for skipping school and creating a fake Facebook profile for the vice principal at her school. A woman in Tulsa told Marydale to keep her head up; a rodeo queen can do anything. A judge in Detroit wrote,
It costs fifty thousand dollars to remand a felon to prison, and we're sending people back for minor infractions like failure to report. If our schools could leverage that kind of money for at-risk youth, this would be a different country.

“Don't you see?” Sierra said. “People are ready for a change! They want to lock up the bad guys, but they don't want to see people like Marydale go to prison for life. They don't want nonviolent offenders sucking up resources. That money could go back to the community. We could build day care facilities and schools and nursing homes where young people take care of the elderly. We could…”

Sierra went on. When she finally left with a breathless, “I've got to go to the prison and tell Marydale,” Grady and Kristen both watched her go, the drum bouncing against her hip.

“I've never heard her play it,” Kristen said.

“She still thinks she can change the world,” Grady said.

For a moment, Sierra's excitement had cheered Kristen. Now, in her absence, the air felt heavier.

“She's young,” Kristen said, still staring at the place where Sierra had disappeared into the motel across the street. “She's a kid.”

“Out here there are kids running the family ranch at eighteen,” Grady said. “There are kids running herd at sixteen. She's old enough.”

“To know better,” Kristen said sadly.

“No,” Grady said. “Just to know.”

Marydale entered the visiting room Tuesday morning. It was never busy. She'd overheard the guards talking about visiting days on the men's side. Sometimes there were lines around the building, sometimes a one-hour limit per visit. Today, on the women's side, there were only five or six prisoners in the visiting room. Two women were seated at a round table talking to the same well-dressed man. One woman sat in the children's play area while a little girl beat two blocks against each other. The rest were paired up with their visitors in facing plastic chairs.

Marydale looked around for Kristen, then for Aldean, then for Kristen's sister and her friends. She recognized no one. She turned to the guard who had let her in.

“Over there.”

The guard pointed to two young women at the far end of the room. They looked about twenty. One sat in a wheelchair, but they both looked athletic and cheerful in pastel sweaters and stocking caps with earflaps and pom-pom tassels. Except for the wheelchair they could have just come in from skiing. The woman in the wheelchair waved.

Marydale approached slowly. “Are you here to see me?”

The girl in the wheelchair held out her hand. She had a firm, warm handshake. “I'm Nyssa,” she said. “And this is my friend Brit.”

They didn't look like the kind of emissaries Gulu would send from the outside world, but Marydale couldn't be sure.

“We came from Bend,” Brit said. “Nyssa wanted to meet you in person.”

“We're on the staff of the newspaper at our college. The
Broadside
, at Central Oregon Community College,” Nyssa said. “We saw that article your girlfriend's sister wrote. Shit! That was crazy what happened to you. I mean, I studied the criminal justice system in American society, but I hadn't thought about it, not really, not until I read the article.”

The girl kept talking, and Marydale sighed inwardly. Some of the women at Holten Penitentiary got visits from strangers—preachers, fetishists, or liberals. The prevailing sentiment was that any visit was better than the routine of prison life, but there was something in the monotony of count and yard and work and dinner that made the hours pass. Standing at the counter folding laundry in the subterranean facility, she lost track of the minutes. If Gulu was out of sight and she felt relatively confident none of the women on her work crew were working for Gulu, she could escape into her thoughts. Visits from the outside world, even Kristen's, made the prison days longer, her cell colder, her fate a fact, not an abstraction.

“As soon as I read about you,” Nyssa was saying, “I knew I had to do something. I mean, this is what journalism is all about. And I know our teacher at the
Broadside
says a reporter's job is to accurately report the news, but journalists can do more. I don't care if they say I'm a crazy millennial. I'm going to make a difference.”

When Marydale worked the tasting room at Sadfire, she had kept up an ever-flowing conversation with the customers. Were they following the Portland Timbers and did they hear about the emu farm out in North Plains? Was it unseasonably warm in Salem, too? Now she could not think of anything to say.

“What do you want?” Marydale asked.

“I got in an accident,” Nyssa said cheerfully, patting the arms of her wheelchair. “When I was little. Dad bicycled a lot. He was really into it. We had a tandem bike. And we got hit.” She shrugged. “It happens.”

“Are you going to tell her?” Brit asked.

“Do you think we can talk somewhere private?” Nyssa asked.

“I don't think they're going to let us do that,” Marydale said. “Unless you were my lawyer.”

“Just tell her,” Brit urged.

“I'm going to tell her.” Nyssa fiddled with the pom-poms hanging from her hat. “Okay. Here goes.” She took a deep breath like someone about to jump from a diving board. “I'm Nyssa…Neiben.”

It took Marydale a second to understand. “Eric Neiben was my defense attorney.”

“He's my dad, and he's, like, my best friend, too. He went with me to get this.” She pulled up her sleeve and pointed to a tattoo of a bicycle. “I still ride,” she added. “I've got one of those hand-power bikes. People at school couldn't believe that my dad went with me to get a tattoo.”

Marydale's heart raced. She hadn't seen Neiben since the day she was escorted from the Tristess courthouse.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

Nyssa sat back. “He took a bribe.”

“What?” Marydale leaned in.

“He—” Nyssa rubbed at the tattoo. “He took a bribe to lose your case.” It came out all in one word.

The noises of the visiting room faded. Marydale stared at the girl.

“I was little,” Nyssa said. “My mom and dad were still together, and my dad and me, we'd just had the accident. Some guy called and said he'd give my dad ten thousand dollars to take this case…and lose. My dad told me years later.”

“My case?”

Marydale saw the Tristess courthouse. She remembered her Walmart separates suit drenched in sweat. She felt Neiben hugging her.
I'm sorry. I did everything I could
.

“My family had a ranch,” Marydale said. “I lost my house.”

“He and my mom fought about it,” Nyssa said. “That's why she left him.”

Anger surged through Marydale, and she understood the women who tossed their cells, who ripped the metal shelving from the cement with their bare, bleeding hands.

“I had a life. I could have had a life. Who paid the money?” Marydale sank her head into her hands. “Ronald Holten. It was fucking Ronald Holten!”

She felt Nyssa's hand on her knee.

A guard called out, “No touching.”

“I know,” Nyssa said. “I know. I read the article about you and everything that happened. My dad doesn't know I'm here.”

“You have to tell someone.” Marydale looked up. Only the guards' motionless stare kept her from grabbing the girl by the hand or by the neck. “Please. You have to talk to the court. Will you talk to my lawyer?”

“She wanted to meet you,” Brit said.

“I wanted to see you,” Nyssa said. “My dad could be in a lot of trouble if people find out.”

For a moment, they stared at each other, and the space between them expanded. Marydale felt like she was going to throw up. But behind the effort it took to sit still and not cry or scream or throw her chair across the room, she felt hope welling up inside her like oxygenated blood coursing through her arteries.

“You seem like a good person,” Nyssa said.

“If I give you my lawyer's number, will you call her?” Marydale asked.

“Yes,” Nyssa said. “Today.”

Kristen gripped the edge of the windowsill in her motel room. On the other end of the phone, Eric Neiben spoke so slowly he could have been forming the words out of clay.

“I know my daughter told you what happened.”

“I'd like you to testify,” Kristen said.

“It's a crime what I did.”

“I know.”

“I could get in a lot of trouble.”

“I'll do everything I can to make sure that doesn't happen.”

“I would like to talk to you in person…if you could come over to Bend.”

Kristen wanted to reach through the phone and shake him.
Just talk to me now!

“We could have this conversation over the phone,” she said.

“No.” There was a silence on the other end. “No. I've been thinking about this for a long time. I want to really
talk
to you.”

She wanted to scream. “I can leave now,” she said.

“How about tomorrow?” he asked. “I need to get a few things in order.”

She ended the call and stumbled out of her room and around the motel. She knocked on Sierra's door, but the HumAnarchists were occupied elsewhere, so she knocked on Aldean's.

“The lawyer. He's going to talk to me,” she said. “I'm going to go to his house tomorrow.”

Aldean opened his arms, and she fell into them. She could feel the hard muscle of his chest against her cheek. In another life, she would have found him handsome. She would have breathed in his cologne and the slight, pleasant gamy smell that clung to him like wood smoke. Now she just drew back and shook her head.

“What if he changes his mind?” she asked. “What if he runs? He could be in Mexico by tomorrow or Canada or anywhere. He took a bribe. It's a fraud against the court. There's no statute of limitations on that, and he knows it. Or he could kill himself. I should call Nyssa. I think she lives with him. She could keep an eye on him. We've come this far. What if I get there and he doesn't want to talk?”

Aldean put his hand on her shoulder. “Come on in.”

His motel room was as clean and spare as the HumAnarchists' was cluttered and personal. He opened a dresser drawer and pulled out an unmarked bottle.

“Consummation Rye.” He took two glasses off the counter. “Do you have a gun?”

“I don't have a gun!”

“I can get you one. Gold House Pawn should have a few, or we can just drive over to Burnville and get one at the Walmart.”

“I don't want a gun. Why would I want a gun?”

“You're right.” Aldean sipped his drink. “I'll go with you. Mary would kill me if she knew I let you go visit some guy's house alone. Cheers.”

Kristen raised the glass to her lips and then lowered it without tasting. “I can't have a drink. What if I have to drive? I need to see Marydale. God, it's too late. They won't let me in after five.”

Aldean set his drink down. “It's going to be okay.”

“What if this Gulu women gets to her before I can get her out? What if Ronald Holten does something to her?”

Aldean put his hands on her shoulders. “This is what you've been waiting for. Right now. This is it. You did it. You found the unicorn.”

The next day, Kristen met Aldean in his motel room, trying not to notice as he tucked a pistol into a holster beneath his canvas Sadfire jacket.

“Never hurts to be careful,” he said, and picked up his keys without asking if Kristen wanted to drive.

Kristen thought she caught a glimpse of Marydale's childhood in the casual way Aldean pushed the HumAnarchists' SUV into gear, saying, “We'll get you there before ten.” It was a world of hard work and long shadows, of young mothers and poor fathers. A world where men were men, women were women. At their best, they were noble siblings to each other. A world in which, for a brief moment, Marydale had stood on the edge of that divide, her radiance so blinding the villagers could not burn her at the stake for breaking their sacred codes.

“Thanks for driving,” she said.

“Of course,” Aldean said.

And then they were silent.

The drive to Bend felt like it took a lifetime, and yet Kristen was surprised when they suddenly found themselves in the squall of urban traffic. Aldean seemed to need no GPS. He glanced at the address Kristen had written down, then drove them past the Mill District, with its decorative chimneys and palatial restaurants, down a long frontage road lined with half-forgotten strip malls, to a neighborhood of tiny bungalows.

Kristen counted the address numbers.

“Here,” she said finally.

The curtains were drawn, and walls of blackberry vines separated the yard from its neighbors on both sides.

“Do you want me to come in?” Aldean asked.

“I don't think he'll talk to us both,” Kristen said.

She felt Aldean's protective gaze as she knocked on the door. The man who opened the door looked about fifty, with glasses and a few strands of dark hair combed over his head. His slacks and tie suggested he was on his way to work, but his bare feet said otherwise. Behind him the house smelled of TV dinners. A girl in a wheelchair sat at the kitchen table, textbooks and notes spread out around her.

“You must be Kristen Brock,” he said. He held out his hand. “Eric Neiben.”

The girl spun herself away from the table and wheeled to the door. “I talked to your girlfriend,” she said. “She seems nice.”

“This is my daughter, Nyssa,” Neiben said. “She's supposed to be studying.”

“Dad!” The girl held up her book. “I am studying.”

“Let's go out back,” Neiben said.

“Good luck, Dad,” Nyssa said.

Out back, blackberry vines surrounded a small, concrete slab.

“I'm glad you're here.” Neiben gestured to Kristen to take a seat on one of the plastic deck chairs, then realized it was wet and wiped it down with his sleeve.

Neiben sat across from her. “Nyssa really liked that story your sister wrote,” he said. “You know, I think that's where Nyssa got the idea she wanted to write…from all the press around the Rodeo Queen Killer. She grew up with it.”

Kristen felt the damp of the chair settle into the fabric of her pants.

“Grew up with it?” Kristen wanted to tell him
it
wasn't a ghost story or a boy band. It was Marydale's life that he had squandered.

“You don't practice law anymore,” Kristen said.

“I do computer security.” Neiben laced his fingers and rested his elbows on his knees, staring at the ground before him. “Do you believe in karma?”

“Maybe, as a kind of metaphor.” Kristen waited.

“Nyssa was nine. We could have had a car.” He glanced back at the house. “I thought I was doing the right thing, you know? We biked everywhere. We ate organic. I've been taking care of her for years. Of course, she doesn't really need anyone anymore, and she could always go stay with her mom if she did. I like to think she needs me, but she doesn't.”

“I don't think you're at risk for a conviction,” Kristen said.

“Fraud against the court.” He sighed. “I probably wouldn't be charged, but you don't know. After what happened to Marydale, it's hard to trust the system.”

Kristen wanted to wring a confession out of him, but there was also something mesmerizing about the small, cold garden space and the pretty girl inside. Kristen could see her through the sliding glass door, tapping her pencil in time to a rhythm only she heard.

“I told Nyssa what happened,” Neiben went on. “I tell her a lot these days. Probably too much. But it's just the two of us. She said I had to talk to you. She's very moral. Maybe it's because of the accident. I don't want to think that, but maybe that's part of it. She knows how fragile it all is.”

Neiben was circling around the truth, and she wanted to squeeze it out of him with her fists.

“She sounds like a very special girl.”

“She is.” He paused. “It was a guy on a cell phone who hit us. He was looking down to dial, and he just swerved into the bike lane. We were on a tandem. I didn't even get a bruise. I wish it had been me. She had so many broken bones, a punctured kidney, a collapsed lung. We thought for a while the paralysis would be much worse. My wife quit her job to take care of her. We fought about that a lot.” Neiben rubbed a hand across his head. “I told my wife we didn't need a stay-at-home mom. We needed money. The best doctors. The best therapies. She quit anyway. My practice wasn't going well. I was fresh out of law school. In Eugene, with the U of O law school right there, there were plenty of young attorneys. And I'd been losing cases. A couple of clients filed bar complaints. Then the accident.”

“And?” Kristen prompted.

“I got a call from this guy,” Neiben went on.

A spit of cold rain hit the concrete slab. Neither of them moved.

“What was his name?”

“He wouldn't give it to me at first. He wanted to talk about my practice. I could tell he was one of those guys who hates lawyers, even when he needs one. He asked if I'd done defense work, but I hadn't except for a couple of DUIs. He said he'd take a chance on me.”

“And then?”

“We talked a couple more times. He talked a lot about stewardship and knowing what the community needed. Then he told me about the Rodeo Killer. I'd heard about her, but I hadn't really thought about it. Some lesbian teenager accused of killing her lover's boyfriend. It just sounded like the kind of thing reporters love.” Neiben ran his hands over his face, pulling his cheeks into a longer, sadder version of his face. “I knew something was wrong. I grew up in a little town east of Wenatchee in Washington. I know how people can be about gays sometimes, especially back then.”

Inside, the girl's cell phone rang, and she answered it, then scooted off into another part of the house.

“Do you mind if I record our conversation?” Kristen asked tentatively.

“Are you trying to get her off?”

“It's too late for that,” Kristen said, although her heart was racing.
Unless compelling evidence is discovered after the statute of limitations has expired, evidence that could not have reasonably been exposed at the time of the crime.

“Post-conviction relief?” Neiben suggested.

“Do I have a case?”

Neiben sat absolutely still, staring at the concrete slab in front of him. Kristen didn't dare take out her phone and start recording.
Talk to me
, she pleaded silently.

“The man's name was Ronald Holten,” Neiben said finally. “I didn't know who he was. I hadn't been following the story closely enough. He offered me ten thousand dollars to take the case and lose it. I asked him why. I still remember he said,
We got the best DA in the county, and we have a judge who knows right from wrong, but you can't trust juries.
I put my name in to be a public defender in Tristess. No one thought anything of it except that I had to be desperate to work all the way out there. Ronald Holten made sure I was picked for the case. I told myself it was for Nyssa, anything for Nyssa.”

“That's tough,” Kristen said. She remembered her first long drive out to Tristess and her frightened, tearful drive back across the sage flats.
The right choice
. She felt a flicker of compassion for Neiben.

“I thought we could get her a new wheelchair, put her in a special school, go to the Mayo Clinic. I don't know what I was thinking.” Again he glanced back at the sliding glass door. “You can't do anything with ten thousand dollars. We were so broke, I thought ten thousand meant something.” Neiben sat back, staring up at the sky. A drop of rain hit his cheek.

“She seems to be doing really well,” Kristen said.

“Marydale Rae didn't do it.” Neiben looked certain and frightened, like a man who had seen a ghost. “I mean, she threw that hay bale, but Aaron Holten was coming for her. He was huge. Ronald Holten took me to his house a couple of times and showed me pictures. I think he was worried I'd go back on our deal, so he showed me these photos of Aaron as a boy. I think it was supposed to make me like him, but the kid was giant. And everyone in that town knew the Holten boys were no good. They had all the money and all the trucks and the land and the guns, and they could do whatever they wanted, and they did. I can only guess what he would have done to Marydale if he'd caught her. I'm sure he would have raped her. I think he might have killed her.”

“But you blew the case?” Kristen asked.

“I blew the case. At the rate I was going, Ronald didn't even have to pay me, but he did. Marydale reminded me a lot of Nyssa even though Nyssa was still little.” He let out a sad laugh. “She had that innocence about her. I let the prosecutor pick the jury. I wouldn't let her bargain down to manslaughter. I told her it was a technique. We never mentioned self-defense, and I didn't let her take the stand because anyone who heard her story…” He shook his head. “She was just a brave kid, and she felt bad about what she'd done. I used that against her. And I spent the money before the trial was even over. My wife left. I guess you can see that.”

Watching him, Kristen thought,
This is the most important day of his life.

“If I can get a post-conviction relief hearing,” she said, “will you testify?”

“Nyssa would like that.” Neiben nodded slowly. “She believes in doing the right thing.”