The Deep End of the Ocean (34 page)

Even after the nurse and the bailiff brought Cecilia in and settled her in the enclosure beside her attorneys, Beth forgot to sit down.

She felt Pat pulling on her arm and twitched her wrist away in irritation, only then recognizing that the press, the officers, and Judge Sakura were already seated. A young Asian man, the judge was regarding her with a waiting glance, an endless and mild dispassion. Beth sat down then with a thud, wincing as she knocked her tailbone on the edge of the bench, aware of the zipping sound of a seam in her skirt splitting.

If she craned her neck slightly, though, she could still see the angelic wide face of the nurse, and just beyond her, Cecil. Had she not had the foreknowledge of Cecil’s identity, Beth would have picked her out only because she wore jail-orange cottons, like a doctor’s scrub suit, the only person in the courtroom not dressed in Sunday-like finery.

Cecil was not only changed. She was buried.

Crammed into the pants and tunic, the swanlike girl Beth remembered now was frankly fat, packed with rolls of flesh, odd protuberances where the skin was simply pushed beyond containing. You could still spot, in the point of her chin, in her wrists, the tiny, still-perfect bones. Cecil looked like a funhouse mirror image, a stuffed-toy Cecil, watching her nurse with rapt attention.

Beth had half-expected to feel a spurt of pity for Cecil, or rage, or something. She felt only a ravening curiosity. She wanted to crack Cecil open like a matrushka doll, opening shell after shell, searching for the woman who had stolen her baby, and beneath that the talented, patrician, disdainful teenage hotbox, and then the sharp-elbowed neighbor kid always glomming onto Ellen.

But Cecil’s attorney, Michele Perrault, stood up now—small as a child, with feathers of short dark hair, dressed in jewelly colors like a medieval troubadour—and so did the DA, both with words slung on their hips like six-guns. It was the chief deputy DA, Candy pointed out, only because this was the Ben Cappadora case, and press from Boston to Brisbane were sardined into the courtroom, watching on closed circuit in two other rooms down the hall, and flowing down the steps outside, onto the curbs, onto the lawns, a human waterfall in the hazy summer sunlight.

“Your Honor,” began Michele Perrault, “I have done this work for a very long time….”

Judge Sakura smiled. “We are all aware of your longevity as a litigator, Ms. Perrault,” he said with immense sweetness.

Perrault softened then, too, and glanced around her almost girlishly, as if suddenly aware of all the cameras and poised pens, the sketch artists busily drawing.

“I’ve done this work for a very long time, relatively speaking,” Perrault began again. “And I have spent many hours with my client, Mrs. Karras, over many days.”

“And?” asked Sakura, scribbling.

“And I have been able to get nothing, nothing out of her that gives me reason to believe that my client can understand the charges she faces. I have the gravest doubts about whether she can assist in her own defense. Usually I can get some kind of response from virtually anyone, no matter how impaired. But my client shows no indication she knows there is someone talking to her at all.”

“While I can understand your conviction, Counsel,” Sakura said, “I’d like to know if you have any documentation about Mrs. Karras’s mental-health history that can support your opinion.”

“I do, Your Honor,” Perrault said quickly. “May I approach?” The judge nodded, and Perrault brought him a sheaf of papers. “These were obtained from the psychiatrists who have treated Mrs. Karras at Silvercrest.”

“For the past four years?”

“And previously, Your Honor. Mrs. Karras has been hospitalized on eight occasions, for periods of several days to several months, and has undergone a wide range of drug treatments and other therapies intended to address her condition.”

“Which is?”

The DA spoke up then, as if, Candy would tell Beth later, he simply needed to pee on the tree and prove he’d been there. “With all due respect to Ms. Perrault, Your Honor, she is not a medical doctor, and not qualified to describe—”

“It’s all in the documents, sir,” Perrault told him. “In lay terms, Mrs. Karras is catatonic.”

Perrault read from her copy. “Mrs. Karras has a long history of mood disorders, going back to her teens, and immobilizing depression that has persisted, off and on, for the past six years, becoming total four years ago. She has not”—Perrault waved at Cecil’s blank presence—“been any better or worse than this since then.”

“I need to study these records, of course,” Sakura said. “I’m sorry if I interrupted you, Ms. Perrault. Did I? But I need to know if the attending physician is present today, and if he can explain to us Mrs. Karras’s condition at the time the alleged abduction took place.”

“He is,” Perrault said. “But he was not treating Mrs. Karras at that time. Her physician at that time was a psychotherapist in Minneapolis, where Mrs. Karras lived on and off before her marriage to Mr. Karras, after her divorce from Mr.—” she sprinted back to her files and consulted a clipboard—“from Adam Samuel Hill, a theatrical writer, to whom Mrs. Karras was married for…well, a total of three years. That therapist was a woman in her sixties, and died two years ago, Your Honor. Mrs. Karras was not hospitalized during that period of her second marriage. And Mrs. Karras’s former husband—”

“Is he here?”

“Mr. Hill is disabled, he suffers from multiple sclerosis, Your Honor. But I have a sworn affidavit from him about Cecilia’s intransigent emotional problems during their marriage. He is extremely apologetic that his condition makes it very difficult for him to travel.”

“Do we have other—?”

“Mrs. Karras’s mother, Sarah Lockhart, is here today. With your permission, I’d like to ask her to describe her daughter’s emotional state at the time of the kidnapping.”

Sakura nodded at the DA. “Is this okay with you?”

“Again, sir,” the DA said, “I have to point out that I am not aware that Cecilia Lockhart Karras’s mother has any credentials that qualify her as an expert medical witness.”

“You know that this court is not going to regard her as such.”

“Thank you, sir. The state is appreciative.”

“Not at all.” The judge nodded to Perrault, who asked to call Sarah Lockhart.

As the trim older woman walked rapidly and silently from the back rows of the huge room, the bailiff Beth had heard Candy call “Elvis,” though his bronze tag said something else, turned to the clerk for the swearing-in. They didn’t use a Bible, Beth noticed. She supposed that was out of fashion.

She still recognized Mrs. Lockhart; she had not seen her in twenty years. Beth studied the older woman’s face carefully as Perrault explained how cooperative Sarah had been, how shocked, how horrified she had been to learn that her grandson was another family’s purloined child. How she had helped, as Cecil’s legal guardian, to obtain medical histories from Cecil’s hospitalization. How bitterly sorry she felt for the Cappadoras—

“We all understand,” the DA put in, with a tick of annoyance, “how Mrs. Lockhart must feel.”

Perrault then burrowed right in, asking Mrs. Lockhart how well she knew the little boy known as Sam Karras.

“Very well indeed,” the old woman whispered. “He was my grandson.” And she looked point-blank into Beth’s eyes, Beth thinking, This is how Cecil would have looked one day—sweetly rounded and Yankee and just the least bit arty, like a matron who’d started the town’s most active book group—had Cecil been spared the hot injection of madness. Sarah Lockhart’s eyes begged Beth. “I never had any idea that he wasn’t Cecilia’s child. Cecilia’s own child by birth.”

“But you were not present for the birth of the child your daughter presented to you as your grandson.”

“No. She and I…Cecilia had a great deal of difficulty in her relationships with her father and me. When she was little, we considered her high-strung…She had tantrums and then blackouts…we thought, an artistic temperament…”

It was not until Sarah Lockhart’s recitation actually began—told Rosie-fashion, with whorls and wings of wee, irrelevant detail—that Beth realized it: There was to be no flash of illumination. Ever.

Over the long summer of the investigation, Beth had herself come to know Cecil as well as the family who had raised her.

That is to say…not at all.

So, half-lulled by the heat of the hundreds of bodies around her in the room, Beth listened to the scant facts of Cecil’s life as her mother, the D.A., and Perrault understood them: her first three marriages, all to theater types, none of which lasted longer than two years. And the pitiful truth that, of all those husbands, the Lockharts had actually met only one: George.

Beth heard about the friends the police had tried to find from Cecil’s flighty periods in Minneapolis, California, and New York. Friends? None of them had ever even shared a meal with Cecil, though a few apartment neighbors in Minneapolis thought they remembered seeing Cecil with a little boy. They seemed to remember that she referred to him as her “nephew.” The one true hope, a designer Cecil had stayed in touch with since college, had died the previous year from AIDS, as had his lover.

Beth could barely rouse herself even when Mrs. Lockhart began to cry, as she described Cecil’s reaction when Adam Hill—“a drama critic, quite well-respected, much older”—abruptly took up with a younger woman, a dancer.

“It was one of the few times that I felt Cecilia really opened up to me,” said Sarah Lockhart. “She was heartbroken. She said she felt used up. Adam never wanted her to grow old, or even to grow up, and she wasn’t even thirty at the time. Of course everyone thought she was years younger.” Mrs. Lockhart began to frankly sob. “And I tried to comfort her, assured her that there were compensations for getting older. She would find a good man and have a child…but of course, she couldn’t.” She looked suddenly at Beth and Pat and said slowly, “We were talking about it last night, her father and I. I’m the only one who can understand Charles very well since the stroke, and we realized that was why she did it, because of the miscarriage…”

Beth leaned forward in her seat, her arms stabbing with adrenaline prickles, aware only of Candy sitting up sharply, adjacent, reaching forward to curl her hand around the back of the bench in front of her.

“The miscarriage,” said the D.A., looking up at Perrault, whose neck was flushed as deeply as her rosy scarf.

“I don’t know this,” Perrault said. “Your Honor, I…”

Sakura slipped his wire-rimmed glasses off and massaged his eyes. “Was Mrs. Karras given a routine physical exam in custody?” The lawyers scrabbled through their papers.

“A battery of neurological tests; we have the results right here, which counsel also has,” the D.A. said quickly.

“A physical exam?” the judge asked again, patiently.

“We were concerned with the patient’s mental and emotional state…” the D.A. replied softly.

“Which can, of course, be affected by her physical afflictions,” the judge said with a sigh. “Mrs. Lockhart, did you forget to tell the police that your daughter had suffered a miscarriage?”

“No.”

“Then, why does Ms. Perrault seem shocked by this knowledge?”

“I didn’t tell them.”

“Why was that?” the judge asked softly.

“Because I wasn’t sure. I still don’t know. Perhaps Charles and I should have brought it up, but we thought better of it.”

“Then, I’m sorry, Mrs. Lockhart, I’m not following you.”

“I’m not following either, Your Honor,” Perrault put in, but he silenced her with a measuring look.

“You have to understand,” Sarah Lockhart pleaded. “We saw our daughter perhaps, oh, three times before she moved back to Chicago with Sam. She didn’t even come home when her father had his first stroke, and was expected to die, though he did recover fully that time…” Sarah Lockhart breathed heavily, and Beth found herself straining to lend the old woman composure across the few feet of air that separated them. “Though I did try, I only spoke with her at any length one other time after the night she told me that Adam was leaving her.”

“And then?”

“And then, she said that the reason he left her was because she was pregnant, and that she was going to get…old and fat.”

“So you went to her?”

“No, because all at once she said the pregnancy was all over; she’d had a miscarriage! And then I didn’t see her again until the authorities contacted us and told us she was in Bellevue; have you ever been there?” Mrs. Lockhart winced; it was long ago, Beth thought, but perhaps not long enough. “Cecilia was just about like she is now, except that she seemed to know me, she would squeeze my hand a little. And the nurses couldn’t get anything out of her. They’d kept trying to find someone to help her, but she…she kept closing like a shell.” Mrs. Lockhart’s dainty hands made a small clam shell, slowly meeting. “It was the police who finally found us, found our address, because Cecilia had been fingerprinted when she was a young woman, arrested in some rally or something, not a crime.”

Beth heard Candy’s rapid snort, and saw, from the corner of her eye, FBI agent Bender stiffen.

“So when you talked with police and investigators from the district attorney’s office, you didn’t think to bring up this miscarriage…”

“I didn’t know if she’d had a miscarriage! You didn’t ever know whether what Cecilia said was true or a dream!” Sarah Lockhart burst out, for the first time angry. “I just knew that my child was slipping into this darkness, and I had to make all kinds of decisions with my husband about whether they should attach electrodes to her head and put her in an ice water bath…”