Best Girl (2 page)

Diane showed up at my door, a worn-out woman around forty who must have been pretty once. She wore a rain jacket over her jeans and carried a black canvas tote bag in one hand, her purse in the other. Nice hair—kind of a pageboy dyed chestnut. She stared at me as if she'd seen a ghost.

“Wow, you look just like your mother. When she was young, I mean.”

I asked her in, nervous and excited both. When she took off her jacket, she was wearing a green scrub tunic. We sat down on my old IKEA sofa, her purse and tote bag between us.

“Are you a nurse?” I asked.

Diane smiled and nodded. She said no more about herself, and I didn't ask.

I went on to what I really wanted to know. “What was she like?”

Diane looked away, remembering. “She was strong. Inside, you know? She knew who she was. No bullshit. Pretty though.” She turned to me. “Dark hair and white skin. Blue eyes. Like you.”

I got a shiver down my back.

“Here's some pictures.” Diane took a manila envelope out of the tote bag and handed it to me.

I peered inside the envelope. My heart jumped. I pulled out a photo.

A cute young couple with lots of hair smiled at the camera in front of Niagara Falls. She wore a short white dress. He was in a suit. They looked happy.

“That's Carol and Freddy on their wedding day,” she said. “They were both twenty-one.”

Freddy.
My father's name was Freddy!

I turned the photo over. Someone had written in:
September
20, 1985
. I was born one year later.

I took out more photos, staring at the mother I would never meet. It was like looking into my own face. The same wary eyes, the high forehead. Then I
was
looking into my own face. Me as a baby. Then as a toddler. My mother, a bit older, sitting on a stoop holding me on her knee, both of us smiling like crazy. There was something weirdly familiar about that stoop. Could I really remember it from when I was that young?

“That's your dad,” said Diane.

I picked up a picture of Freddy. His longish hair was pulled back into a ponytail, his head turned a bit so I could see his ear. And there it was! The clamshell ear I hated on me. No earlobe. Only it looked good on him.

Tears filled my eyes. Embarrassed, I stuck my hand into the envelope again and pulled out something else. A faded flyer: three young guys playing music onstage. The Tranzac Club. The date at the bottom was August 2, 1984.

“That was Freddy's band,” said Diane.

“My father was a musician?” Young and skinny, Freddy played the guitar, looking spaced out on bliss.

“Vandal Boss. They did okay.”

“The one with Stu Van Dam?” I asked.

Vandal Boss was local, and I was interested in bands so I'd heard of them, though they never made the big time. Their claim to fame was Stu Van Dam. I peered more closely at the shot. The lead dude in the middle practically chewed on the microphone. That was Stu. He'd become a star on his own in the nineties with a hit song—they still played it on the radio. Blond. Full of himself. Behind them sat a guy on drums. I was trying to remember what happened to them. They'd dropped off the radar.

My father had played with a band! I was excited. That's where I got it from!

“Where's Freddy now?” I wanted to meet him!

Diane looked at me strangely. “You really don't know?”

“Know what?”

She hesitated. “I met your mother when I worked in the infirmary. She got sick a few years ago. The chemo helped for a while, but then…I got to know her. She was a kind person. She didn't do what they said.”

CHAPTER TWO

“W
hat do you mean?” I asked.

Diane squirmed on the sofa and looked away. “It's hard for me to tell you.”

I got a bad feeling about what was coming.

“It was a prison infirmary.”

“She was in jail?” I gasped in spite of myself. “What did she do?”

Diane cleared her throat. “She was in for murder.”

“Murder?”

Diane stared straight ahead.

“Who?” But I knew before she said it.

“They said she killed Freddy. But she didn't do it.”

My hand went to my mouth. Maybe Shelley was right. Maybe it was better not to know. I was the kid of a murderer. Tears dripped onto my arm.

Diane sat on the edge of the sofa, watching me. “This is what Carol told me: Vandal Boss toured around the country. Freddy was always out of town. Groupies followed them wherever they went. They liked Freddy. He was the quiet one. He could've had any of them, Carol said. She knew, but she was stuck at home with”— she looked at me—“a baby. They always argued when he came home, she said. One night Carol was asleep when he came back from some gig. She woke up when she heard screaming. She ran downstairs and found him lying inside the front door. A knife in his chest.”

I was breathless. But I had to think. “She didn't see anybody?”

Diane shook her head. “Nobody saw anything. The cops said she planned it, so that made it first-degree murder. She got life.”

She'd been alive all this time. My brain had to adjust to that idea. “But if she didn't do it…” I said. “Who did?”

Diane shrugged. “She was sure it was a jealous boyfriend. She warned Freddy— all his fooling around would catch up with him one day.”

“She didn't see anybody outside the house?”

“Nothing.”

“Did anyone check around to find the guy?”

“She didn't have any names. Freddy didn't talk about his girlfriends. The cops concentrated on her. They said it was almost always the jealous spouse.”

I hated being negative, but they had a point.

She must've sensed my doubt. “Here.” She lifted the tote bag and held it out to me. “Some of the women prisoners wrote to you. And there's a notebook. They found it under her mattress when they were cleaning out her cell.”

I pulled out a lined notebook, the kind kids use in school. Diane watched as I opened it to the first page.

January
12, 1992

Hey, Universe, You happy now? Everything
I had is gone—the only man I ever loved.
My little girl. And my freedom. What about
the guy who killed Freddy? I'll bet he's living in
a nice house and driving a fancy car. I see red
when I think of him out there. I try to picture
what he looks like so I can hate him better, but
all I can see is devil horns on his ugly head.
I keep going over that last night in my head—me
waking up in bed. The scream. Me coming
downstairs. Freddy lying in the hall. The knife,
the blood…No! I won't think about that. Who
was it? Who took my Freddy from me?

I felt dazed. My head was going to explode. I couldn't move when Diane stood up.

“Here's my address and phone number if you want to reach me.” She put a slip of paper down on my coffee table.

I couldn't get a word out, but somehow she understood and quietly left. I turned the page of the notebook.

January
19, 1992

Hey, Universe, All the women here say they're
innocent and that they're in jail by mistake.
I don't bother to say,
Me too
. I know no one
will believe me. Every night I pray I'll wake up
from the nightmare, and every morning I wake
up in this cell.

January
26, 1992

Hey, Universe, I dreamt about Mandy again.
I can't stand thinking I'm not there while
she's growing up. She'll never know me.
Or worse, she'll hear about me and think I
killed her father. She's too young to understand
now. And when she's old enough, she'll be in the
middle of a new life. She'll have new parents
that love her, and the best thing for her is if she
never knows I exist. It hurts so much that I'll
never see my little girl again.

I tried to remember being five. That's how old I was in 1992 when she wrote the note. My chest felt tight.

I flipped numbly through the pages in a daze. The letters to the Universe were all variations on the same themes. She missed Freddy. She missed me. She was innocent. She had written once a week for nearly two years. A hundred pages; that was all the notebook had. Her last entry:

November
19, 1994

Hey, Universe, No one will ever believe I'm
innocent; I have to accept that. I'll never see
little Mandy again, I have to accept that too.
I have to move on. I'll never stop loving Freddy.
The only thing I have left of him is his guitar.
I keep seeing us when we were teenagers and
he taught me the chords. I hold it close to me
and I can almost smell him in the wood. The
women here like to listen to me play. They say
it calms them down. Christmas is coming, and
they want me to give a little concert. Maybe a
sing-along. They hum the songs when I practice.
I'm trying to figure out the chords to some
carols. Maybe after Christmas we can put
together a choir! Wouldn't that be rich? I'd be
teaching music again.

Another musician! I had genes on both sides.

Diane said they found the notebook under her mattress. That meant she didn't want anyone reading it. So when she said she was innocent, it was like she was talking to herself. Didn't that mean she was telling the truth?

I found at least twenty notes from the women in another manila envelope, some scrawled and childlike, some neat and carefully written.

Dear Mandy, The cops should burn in hell for
putting your mom in here. She was no killer. Patty.

Dear Mandy, Your mom was the best. Rest
in Peace. Lottie.

Dear Mandy, If it wasn't for your mom and
the choir, I'd be dead. There was nothing to live
for till I started to sing. I owe her. Dale.

Dear Mandy, Your mom shouldna been
here. It was wrong cause she didn't kill no one.
Her music helped me go on. Vi.

There was a business-sized envelope in the bag. The letterhead said it was from a lawyer named Randall Webb. I pulled out a single page.

Dear Carol,

I'm afraid I have bad news. Our appeal was
turned down. In his explanation, the judge said
there was no new evidence, so no new trial. I'm
very sorry. Sometimes the justice system isn't
fair. I know you're innocent but have no way to
prove it. I will keep in touch.
Randy

The lawyer thought she was innocent! His opinion meant more than Diane's and the other prisoners', didn't it? Maybe I wasn't the kid of a murderer. I looked at the lawyer's letterhead. It had his phone number. The letter was dated May 1995. Fifteen years ago, but what the heck. I hesitated, then punched in the numbers.

A woman answered. She asked my name and, to my surprise, put me through.

“Hello.”

“Mr. Webb, I hope I'm not bothering you, but you were my mother's lawyer years ago…”

“Who's this?”

“Carol Allan's daughter.”

“It's Amanda?”

“Uh, yeah…”

“I'm so sorry. I heard about her… passing. She was a class act.”

I took that in for a second. “I hope you don't mind—I wanted to ask you something.”

He didn't interrupt to tell me he was too busy.

“I know it was a long time ago. But— why did the jury convict her?”

“Oh. That
was
a long time ago.” He paused and I half expected him to beg off. But then he went on.

“I was straight out of law school, just finished articling. She called me first because we went to high school together.”

“You did?”

“She couldn't afford a real lawyer.” He smirked into the phone. “She was assigned a legal-aid lawyer who didn't give a crap. I worked with him, but it was hopeless. She lost because I didn't know what I was doing and the real lawyer didn't care.”

“So she didn't do it?”

“Evidence was circumstantial. The steak knife was like a million others made in China and sold by Canadian Tire. Every house had a set just like it.”

“Well then…?”

“The jury didn't like her. She wasn't soft like some women. She came across gutsy, didn't apologize for herself. They misread her.”

It was a lot to take in. I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything.

“Look, my secretary's preparing some estate documents for you. Why don't you come by in a few days to pick them up? We'll talk.”

I didn't know what to think. My mother was a convicted killer, but people close to her believed she was innocent. How could I form an opinion if I never knew her?