From the Chrysalis (47 page)

And it wouldn’t have, except …
 

The front page headline exploded in her face.
Secret Deal Ends Trial
. She had to be imagining things. Holding her breath, she read the headline twice more before she aimed the paper at Janice’s wastepaper basket and missed. She tried to breathe, knowing she had to get a grip. This rush of anger could be toxic in her present condition.

She had to know. Goddamn Dace’s bleeding heart lawyer, she thought, retrieving the paper. So far all Gold had done was yap about the big city bucks he had lost on this case. Common decency suggested he might have given her some warning, but he was probably too busy digging up somebody else’s dirt when he wasn’t playing chess. With Dace. With her. With everybody.

The morning passed with her trying to read and reason. It was a process that had eluded her for several days, leaving her in a maze of dead ends whichever way she turned. Well, maybe it would still be all right. Maybe Gold had gotten Dace a good deal. He was such a well-respected lawyer, after all.
 

Sitting cross-legged in her tangled sheets, her gorge rising in her throat, she read through three lengthy articles in the
Maitland Spectator
, practically the only news in the paper
.
“Secret Deal Ends Trial,” “Judge Washes His Hands” and “The Reasons For The Bargain.” She read each article at least three times, but it didn’t help. She began to wonder if she really were going insane. Nothing—
nothing
made any sense.

The defence lawyers had made their decisions over a Christmas lunch in a suburban motel, in cahoots with both the Crown attorneys and the Judge, although Silverton claimed he couldn’t remember why the defence lawyers had wanted to see him.
Couldn’t remember?
Wasn’t the lawyers’ seasonal invitation only a few days old? The whole deal had almost been quashed by the Attorney-General who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—promise not to appeal the sentences.

Several of the accused prisoners were unhappy with their plea bargains, possibly because their own stories hadn’t even been told. Only two of thirteen cases had been heard and unfortunately D’Arcy Devereux’ had been one of them. Two unidentified prisoners had also held out for trial by jury before succumbing to pressure from their fellow accused and their own attorneys.
Let’s go home,
everybody’d said.
 

No opinion was expressed about how the jurors felt about seeing their virtually unpaid labor for the past few months get flushed down the proverbial toilet, somewhere between the overcooked luncheon turkey, the canned cranberry sauce and two or three twenty-sixers of Johnny Walker. But even if they hadn’t concurred with Judge Silverton when he doubted their ability to untangle the mess, they were undoubtedly relieved to be packing their bags and going home, as were the thirteen defence lawyers and two Crown attorneys who had already checked out of Maitland’s finest motel.

Long before Liza was through, the newspaper was strewn all around the room. If she had allowed it, a low keening would have risen from her throat, try as she did to convince herself this was the best of all possible outcomes. Dragging herself over to the window, she leaned her elbows on the sill and stared at the grey sky outside. The facts were these: Huey Gold
was
a good lawyer. Her cousin had pulled the lightest sentence: two years to be served concurrent.
Concurrent.
If she’d been related to one of the victims instead of to Dace, she would probably have asked what the point was of doing that.
 

She picked up her phone and dialed Hubert Gold long distance. She’d gotten his Toronto number from Directory Assistance the first time she had ever called him. She was surprised when he answered his own phone.

“What happened? Why?” was all she said.

“I’m sorry,” he replied. “I should have called you myself. It’s been so hectic, you know. I just got back to Toronto. It’s a normally a three hour drive, but it took me four.”

“
Dace
…” she said, gripping the phone and closing her eyes.

“I know, I know. You must think it’s ironic that your cousin was actually convicted of assaulting Belissimo, a man who hadn’t even been in the victims’ circle. He had a sprained wrist, a bruised jaw and no sense of self-preservation. One of D’Arcy’s friends will probably kill him before the year’s out.”

“Great. So justice will be served. And Dace? My Dace? How’s he? Is he still in Segregation? Or couldn’t you even get him out of the Hole?”

“Look, Miss Devereux, Liza, I did my best. I don’t want you think badly of me. In the end I think the court grasped the situation, that the presence of the sex offenders produced an undesirable effect, especially among the accused. We were just talking about this at lunch. And the army, well, let’s just say that in retrospect, they probably shouldn’t have brought the army in on the last day. Negotiations were going well and I’m telling you this from the authorities’ point of view. Anyway, we know that some of the inmates went a little crazy when they saw the soldiers in the yard. D’Arcy’s friend Steve wasn’t actually in on the beatings, but we think he offed one of the victims later, when he was drunk or high.”

“But not Dace. He didn’t. And he protected those hostages, you know he did.”

“I know, I know. We’ve been over this before. But that’s the way the game’s played, and he knows it. Courtroom outcome isn’t predictable. It’s a game, not some
Perry Mason
drama with a neat and tidy outcome. Luckily I know how to play it. You know he got the lightest sentence, Liza, in spite of the fact Silverton really wanted his throat.”

“Uh, huh. And why’s that?”

“Well, Judge Silverton, you know, he really should have excused himself from this trial, considering his prior connection to Dace. I checked and his nephew is still working in some northern school.”

Hurting more children
, she thought. “So Dace is jubilant, I suppose?” she said aloud, furious there was nothing she could do without exposing both Dace and Rosie.
 

“Your sarcasm—I can see it’s a family trait. Well, he’s a little under the weather, I admit, but that’ll pass. He’s tough. It’s not the first time something like this has happened to him. My dear, he’s only twenty-four and he’s already spent almost six years in jail. After we got the verdict—it only took the jurors a couple of hours yesterday—he stopped speaking to me. We wondered what had happened to you. You’d never missed before. In retrospect, I’m glad you weren’t there. And I believe D’Arcy was glad, too. He looked … ashen, although of course he never said a word. He didn’t make a sound.”

“My God. I wasn’t there!”

“Liza, there was nothing you could have done.”

“But I’ve got to do something! Please, Mr. Gold. I’ve got to see him. Is there no way?”

“Oh Liza, I’m so sorry. It’s not in my power, young lady.”

“It’s Judge Silverton, isn’t it? He couldn’t get him on a murder rap because you had something on him,” she reluctantly conceded. “But he’s still calling the shots.”
 

“Maybe,” Gold demurred. “He’s a powerful man, at least in Maitland.”

“Oh, c’mon. Several people heard him in the lunchroom at the courthouse talking off the cuff. He said Dace was a vicious punk then, and he’s a vicious punk now. What does “then” mean? Was he talking about that school?”

“I don’t know, Liza, but there’s another problem. Those prison guards carry more weight than we realized.”

“So he’s screwed Inside or Out?”

“Now, now, I wouldn’t say that. He’ll be fine as long as he doesn’t do something, uh, rash
,
like attack one of the guards or try to escape.”

“Escape?” she echoed doubtfully. “Yeah, maybe he could go after Silverton.”

“That would be very foolish indeed.”

“My God, do you really think Dace is a cold-blooded killer? That he would
execute
that creep?”

“My dear girl, of course not. I … sorry, that’s my other phone ringing. I’ve got to go.”

“Well, go then,” she said dully.

“Listen, Liza, all he has to do is watch his back, keep a cool head and he’ll be all right. He’ll do that, won’t he? As long as you’re there for him? I’ll get him to write you a letter when he’s feeling better. You mustn’t worry. The moment he comes around we’ll launch our appeal.”

“Great,” she said, reaching over and double-locking her door in case she started yelling. She didn’t want anyone coming in to find out what was going on. “Another letter,” she added listlessly. “Well, put it in the mail.”
 

After Gold said good-bye she left the phone off the hook, pinned a brown wool blanket over her window and went to bed. The phone stopped buzzing after a couple of minutes. Thank God Janice was away. She felt like a Victorian lady with an opiate addiction, but nothing induced her to move, not even when somebody came to say Joe was on the hall phone or Mel was calling long distance. She thought about taking the train to see Mel in Trenton, but in the end she didn’t dare. No way she could face Mel now.

She had no way of knowing if Uncle Norm and Rosie were at home or out celebrating at a local pub as Dace lay on a cot, rigid with shame because he had sold himself out. But she guessed.

Dace must have seen this one coming, but he hadn’t been able to steer clear. Stupid. It made him sound almost hapless, everything he was not. But in the end it was just like he’d predicted. Unless he wrote a book or went on radio talk shows—or she did—people were always going to think he got away with murder, weren’t they? For the rest of his life. Or longer. His name would always be linked to the beating and torture of the two men who had died during the Maitland Penitentiary Riot.

Chapter 33

Wanting and Wanted

Even though she knew they wouldn’t let her see Dace, Liza petitioned the prison. She also wrote or called everybody she knew with even the most remote connection to his case, but she had no luck. She briefly considered confessing that she was pregnant, wondering if that would help, then decided against it.
 

Hubert Gold was unsuccessful. Based on his experience, he said Dace and his so-called fellow conspirators would probably remain in Segregation for at least a year. Nobody was in a hurry to let them out. Of course that meant no visitors. A year! Liza sobbed, then raged. By now, all she wanted was some assurance he was all right, that he wasn’t going to stick himself or maybe several guards with a knife. And to be with him one more time. Oh how she longed for that: his eyes, his arms, his hands, his lips … It had been so long since she’d touched him.
I used to want so much
. Babies, books, bikes, a great love affair
and
a chance to write.
 

She wrote him several letters—
I’m not going anywhere until I know you’re all right
—and every night when she went to sleep, the same dream came.

The door, a metal weave with dime-sized holes, opened and closed behind her with a bang. A furtive little man let her in. Strange, he didn’t look like a guard. “Twenty minutes,” he said, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet like a squirrel. “I’m not really one of them. That’s all I can risk.”
 

Dace stood by a space-saver sink, the smallest one she’d ever seen. Its chief virtue was that it was almost new. The pipe under the sink leaked a little.
 

“Liza?” he said, his face almost lost in his hair and beard. “Are you really here? Or is it my imagination? How did you get in? What did you have to do? I must be seeing things. This whole place is just one big mind fuck.”

She crossed the floor in two strides, pushing herself into his chest until he had no choice but to hold her in his arms. “Don’t ask,” she whispered, her mouth brushing against the skin under his unbuttoned shirt. “What’s this? This cut on your chest? It looks like it’s getting infected, it’s all—”

“Savage. It was Savage. He has a little pen knife he likes to play with. One time he almost cut off … My God, you
must
be real. You’re crying again and you shouldn’t. Do you know what that does to me?”