The Sabbathday River (32 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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“She appeared hysterical at that time. The request seemed hysterical.”
“Hysterical!” Judith was enraged. “Jesus, you have gall.”
“The confession was proper,” Charter said again, though tersely this time. “And I resent your inference otherwise. Our only
mistake
, as you put it, was conflating what were actually two confessions into one event, but this was in keeping with the information we had at that time.”
Judith stared at him. She seemed to be thinking. Then she sat forward in her chair. “Forensic tests on both babies are continuing, I assume?”
“They are,” he said. “But I can assure you that the knitting needle Heather identified is entirely consistent with the wound the first baby received, so I wouldn't place too much hope on—”
“I was thinking more of serology,” Judith broke in. “I expect you'll be trying to establish maternity through blood type?”
“And paternity, yes. We took a blood sample from Ashley Deacon several days ago.”
“Well then—” Judith smiled. “If, as I very strongly suspect, you discover that Heather Pratt does
not
have a parental relationship to the Sabbathday River baby, you will naturally cease this ridiculous attempt to pin a gruesome murder on my client and use a coerced confession to make it stick. And since your only ‘confession,' as you call it, was to the murder of the Sabbathday River baby, then you won't have any evidence at all on the baby found in Heather's pond.”
He smiled. His elbows were planted on the desk, and his palms together before his face, as if he were saying a bedtime prayer. “All that is true, Mrs. Friedman. But unlike you I have every confidence that the serology will show Heather to have been the parent of both babies. We have an arraignment date, incidentally.”
“Excuse me?”
she shouted. “You couldn't get an arraignment date without an indictment!”
He nodded in agreement and began looking around his desk, lifting stacks, riffling through the In box. “I would have sent it,” he said with deeply insincere courtesy, “but I knew you were coming.” He handed it over. “Grand jury met on Friday,” he said affably as she read, her face a mask of incredulity.
Then Judith looked up, and slowly she shook her head.
“There's always a woman to blame, isn't there?”
He considered this. “Always? No. But in this case, yes. There is a woman to blame.”
“You could stop this right now, but you're too proud to do it.” She was staring at him, as if he were some rare creature from a distant place, transported an imponderably vast distance only for normal people to gape at. “Well, it's your mistake, Mr. Charter. I expect you'll think back to this interview very soon and wish you'd stopped it. You'll be a laughingstock, you know. And very much hated. But very famous, too, if you take this on. Well, I guess you know that already. Though maybe you don't know what you're going to be famous
for
.” Judith picked up her briefcase. Naomi, following her lead, got up with Polly and slung the diaper bag over her shoulder. The girl was sucking an ear of her elephant, her gaze gray and steady on Charter. “Women won't stand for this,” Judith said. It sounded, to Naomi's admittedly stunned ears, like a warning.
“Women!” He put his head back and choked out a single laugh. “What does this case have to do with
women?
”
Over the Edge
HEATHER STAYED IN JAIL. POLLY STAYED WITH NAOMI, who grew even more attached to her. Judith made an effort to get some kind of bail for her client, but Charter produced a psychiatrist to proclaim Heather a threat to her own safety. Ultimately she was moved to the locked ward of a mental facility east of Peytonville, in the lake region, where, according to Judith, she lapsed further into depression. Polly was no more permitted to visit her mother in the hospital than she had been in the medical ward of the jail, so Naomi sent photographs and tape cassettes of Polly's words as they came, and crayon scribbles. She had no idea if any of it was delivered. Judith, with a trial date of March 2, was forced to temper her indignation and apply herself to other cases. The number of these surprised her. The fact that none of them involved the theft of cows amused her husband.
And, as she had warned Naomi, she did indeed disappear every couple of weeks, always returning depleted and reticent. Naomi would sometimes learn of these trips only in retrospect, though she saw Judith often and though, as the weeks passed and the fall sank into early, hard
winter, the connection between them grew both easier and more complex. In the openness of their friendship, Judith kept this one door tightly locked, and Naomi respectfully did not knock. It wasn't unusual, for example, for the two women to spend an evening at Naomi's or Judith's house, cooking and talking, often at the expense of husbands, past and present, and take leave of each other in some small hour of the night, and then for Naomi to call the next day and learn Judith was gone-down to Providence for a weekend or a week. The more time passed, the less able Naomi felt to broach the subject.
Not that her curiosity took too much time away from other things. Her life with Polly consumed her, wearied her, and amazed her. She had not imagined how satisfying she would find the most mundane acts involved in caring for Polly: the diapers and baths, the endless rotation of a handful of acceptable foods. She enrolled them in a baby music class and drove down to Hanover once a week to watch Polly bang a drum and ring a bell while a woman led them in silly songs. She took Polly to the sports center for parent-toddler swimming, moving her little limbs in the water while the little girl shouted and smacked the surface. She loved the routine of taking Polly to the supermarket, telling her the names of things, the colors of the bright boxes. And she took Polly to work, setting her down in the office with her toys, or sitting her on her lap while she used the computer. It seemed, as the weeks went by, that she brought less and less of herself to maneuvering her own adult life within the community. This was perhaps no bad thing, Naomi thought, when she thought about it, because her life in the community seemed more perilous than ever before.
In this empty period between confession and trial, the town seemed to settle its own mind on what newspapers were now pretty consistently calling the Goddard Babies Case. Heather Pratt, the mother of twins, the murderer of twins, was a topic few needed to discuss, because there was nothing but agreement on the matter. Whatever bitterness was being vented had to do more with what this meant for the town itself. Whatever tears were being shed were not for Heather, nor even for the babies, but for the town's new and now inescapable slogan, cleverly penned by a wag on
The Boston Globe
: “Goddard, New Hampshire—Dead Baby Capital of New England.” The women, in particular, were incensed. Naomi remembered with grim humor Judith's theory that women would support Heather, that they would identify with her and come to her aid.
But in the weeks following Heather's imprisonment, there was not a single gesture of support, not even an insincere one. Naomi received no offers of help with the baby, and Judith no calls saying how awful it all was. Even Stephen Trask turned away from her when Naomi passed him at the sports center. He seemed, to her annoyance, to take Heather's situation as a personal failing.
Judith met occasionally with Heather and reported her spirits as stable, though not particularly good. She was refusing to discuss her experiences with the psychiatrist assigned to her, but she was forthcoming with Judith, at least in responding to questions, though never exactly volunteering information. She told Judith about her brief experience at college, her passion for Ashley, her joyous first pregnancy. She admitted not caring that Ashley was married, or that the affair had plainly become common knowledge, or that she herself seemed to be apportioned the full blame for it. She answered the most rudimentary queries about her grandmother, whom she loved and missed, and her mother, whom she had not seen for many years, and the work she did for Naomi and the collective. What Heather really wanted to talk about, of course, was Ashley. She wanted to know how he was, how his children were. She wept when Judith showed Heather his name on the prosecution's witness list, though Judith tried to explain that this did not mean he was “against” her, per se. Naomi's name, after all, was on the same list.
All told, there were few surprises in the district attorney's emerging case. In addition to Ashley, various observers of his and Heather's affair would report on her wanton behavior, and Sue Deacon would take the stand to portray the wronged wife. Heather's midwife and the doctor who had examined her after her arrest were due to testify, as was Nelson Erroll—who, Judith assumed, would introduce the confession—the medical examiner, and a forensic serologist. It was the serologist who most concerned Judith. As the weeks passed and no report on the babies' (and their putative parents') blood types arrived in her office, she bombarded Charter with demands for disclosure, but he only said that tests were not yet complete. Even Judith, who had seemed to have complete confidence that the first baby's blood group would be incompatible with those of Heather and Ashley, began to worry, and the trial date approached with no sign of Charter backing off.
A second formidable obstacle was that Heather would not agree to testify. The very prospect terrified her, she said, and she would not listen
to Judith's claim that her own words were her single greatest asset. Heather must be able to respond to the moral condemnation the prosecution would offer, Judith said, and with the plain language of human love and frailty; she was, Judith reminded her, not at all a calculating and uncaring mistress, but a young girl who had fallen deeply in love with a man—a man, Judith said harshly, who had then abandoned her with one infant and a second on the way. Heather must herself tell the jury of her intense distress and her fears, and the confusion and panic she felt as the new baby's birth approached. She must tell the court how she had never intended harm to her baby, but that when the baby appeared dead at birth, she had made the bad decision to hide the body and try to recover from this trauma in private. Her own words were the magic that would undo this hasp. Judith explained this clearly, and without giving in to a strong temptation to yell at the girl. Then she gave in to temptation and yelled, but that didn't work either. Heather refused to testify.
Every day Naomi and Judith expected Charter to call. Every day they were sure it was imminent, his sheepish admission that, having now ascertained that the Sabbathday River baby was not Heather's—had no connection to Heather at all—his office would be dropping one of the counts of second-degree murder. Moreover, given the lack of confession in the matter of the second baby, not to mention the lack of evidence that the second baby was anything but a stillbirth, those charges would be dropped as well. But the days passed and the call didn't come. Judith's own calls went unanswered. She grew first concerned, then suspicious. Finally, she waited for him in the morning outside his office, watched him walk in, then followed. This was February, less than three weeks before they were due to go to trial.
That afternoon, Judith stormed into the mill, flung her heavy overcoat on a chair, and told Naomi she had to speak to her.
Naomi nodded dumbly, immediately tense. She was at her desk, working at the computer. In the workroom half a dozen people were sitting in a circle. There was laughter, Judith noted, and this enraged her further.
“I went to see that bastard. That
bastard
!” She glared at Naomi. “He wouldn't return my calls. I kept asking for the serology report, and he wouldn't send it.”
“The serology report,” Naomi repeated.
“And the trial's less than a month away! I don't even think I've got time to get a defense expert without having to ask for a delay. Not that he'd even give me the babies' blood samples. He'll probably claim they were entirely used up in the testing. Jesus!”
“Judith,” Naomi said, “I don't know what you're saying.”
She took a breath. She was trying to get herself under control.
“All right. These are the prosecution's serologist's results. For baby number two—the baby from the pond—there is, quote, high probability that Heather and Ashley are the parents.”
“Right,” Naomi said. “As Heather said.”
“Right. Now listen to this. For baby number one, the river baby. Heather's blood type shows her to be a ‘possible' mother, but Ashley's paternity has been definitively ruled out.”
Naomi brightened. “So that's great. That's what we were hoping. He isn't the father, so it isn't Heather's.”
Judith set her jaw. Slowly she shook her head.
“What do you mean, no? No
what
?” Naomi said.
Judith, unable to speak, kept shaking her head.
“Just tell me,” Naomi said, baffled and impatient.
“Think, Naomi.
Twins
. No,” she corrected herself. “Don't bother thinking. Thinking implies it will make sense, and it won't. That crazy bastard. He's tilting at windmills, but he hasn't got an ounce of honor.”
“Twins,” Naomi repeated. “I don't get it. Twins have the same parents.”
“One would think,” Judith sneered.
There was silence as this, with excruciating slowness, gradually became clear.
More than anything she wanted to laugh. It had all gone over the edge now, into some immense absurdity.
“It even has a name,” Judith was saying. “Listen to this: superfecundation. This is what you call it when a woman has twins by different fathers.”
“It's impossible,” said Naomi, who was still laughing inwardly.
“It is not quite impossible. It is very nearly impossible. Statistically, yes, it's so far out that you could call it impossible, but there exists the minuscule chance. This is where reasonable doubt comes in,” she said with great exasperation. “Juries say they understand it, but they don't a lot of the time. You tell them, Well, you don't have a
reasonable
doubt
that the sun will rise tomorrow, do you? And one idiot will think,
But it might not
. That's all it takes. Oh, Naomi, this is so, so crazy.”
“But”—she still couldn't seem to catch on—“I don't understand who they're going to say is the other father. There was only Ashley. And wouldn't a second father have had to sleep with her like at the same time?”
“Oh no,” Judith said lightly. “I've just been given a mini-course in this nonsense. Within twenty-four hours, before or after. The woman releases two eggs—well, it's true, that happens all the time. But then there are two
fertilizations
, each by a different father.
Voilà!
And here's where it's so terrible. They've got a whole gang to go up there and say Heather was a woman of no morals. What's a second lover! What's having sex with two guys within twenty-four hours! I don't think it matters if they come up with a name or not. By the time Charter's finished his case, she'll be the Whore of Babylon.”
“God.” Naomi was horrified. The weight of this was hitting her now. She looked involuntarily at Polly, who was napping in her playpen next to the attic stairs. “But … Judith, I can't believe the attorney general will let Charter mount a case like this. I mean, claiming that this girl had twin babies by different fathers, chucked one in a pool of water and stabbed the other—it just defies belief on about eight different fronts at once. He'll put a stop to it. He won't want to be associated with something so nutty.”
“That's what I thought,” Judith said with renewed wonder. “I said that to him, and you know what he said? ‘I assure you that I have the full support of the attorney general on this matter.'”

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