The Lavender Hour (26 page)

“I hope you die!” the woman screamed again. I froze, suddenly terrified. Those were the kind of people who killed doctors at women's clinics. Insanely, in the nanosecond it took for an entire soap opera to play in the mind, I saw the woman raise a gun, heard
a shot, pictured myself falling. If she killed me, would people protest that, scream at her that she should die? Then a hand gripped my elbow, breaking my paralysis, and Gage was there, guiding me through the courthouse door, furious.

“Tell Nelson I want guards outside tomorrow,” he barked at the officer who manned the security check, a heavyset man named Connolly with balding red hair and pitted skin.

Still shaken—I hope you die—I set my handbag on the belt, watched it disappear behind the flaps of the X-ray box, and stepped through the metal-detector gates. I didn't wear jewelry, anything that might set off the alarm and delay the process or give Connolly an opportunity to pull me aside for a more thorough search. Only two days in court, and already I had learned how to make it easier.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Gage said. Somehow he'd managed to find a vacant conference room that morning, and he led me there.

The previous two days had been spent impaneling the jury. During preliminary questioning, Judge Fiona Savage—her name an omen that gave me nightmares—excused thirty jurors: five for medical reasons, two because of their age, and twenty-three because they either currently had a family member with cancer or had recently lost a close relative to a lengthy illness. That took care of one-third of the one hundred people who had been summoned to appear. Four jurors had asked to be excused, requests she had denied.

When the judge was satisfied with those remaining, the clerk drew numbers for twelve jurors, eight men and four women, and two alternates, both men. It had been nearly noon by then, so we had taken a lunch break. Gage had ham salad sandwiches sent in, but spent most of his time holed up in a corner on the phone. He made one call the second the door closed, and then a half hour later was back at it, this time taking notes. At one thirty, the court reconvened, and Gage and the DA had taken turns questioning individual jurors. Nelson, the DA, was trying the case himself instead of turning it over to one of the assistant DAs. He was good-looking
and slender and everything Gage Fisk wasn't, and I was scared to death of him. He challenged two jurors, both women about my age. Gage exercised his arbitrary peremptory challenge only once: juror number sixty-seven, a middle-aged woman with neatly waved brown hair wearing a blue pantsuit. She had smiled at me from the box, and that quick smile had given me hope. When Gage challenged the woman, I tugged at his sleeve, bent my head to his, and told him I thought that was a mistake, that the prospective juror had smiled at me and that seemed a good sign. Without a word, Gage pushed his pad in front of me. I recognized it as the one he had used for notes during the lunch break. He pointed to the notes next to the number of the one he had challenged, juror sixty-seven, and I read the notations. She was a regular attendee of the Catholic Church and sent annual contributions to one of the extreme right-to-life organizations. “How did you find that out so fast?” I whispered. He only winked at me and turned back to the jury. For the first time since I had hired him, I felt confident I had not made a mistake. I took another glance at the pad as he rose to question another juror and noticed that number eighty—three, a woman named Martha Anderson, was a widow whose only son had died in a car accident when he was forty-six, almost the same age as Luke. I hadn't liked the coincidence, and when Gage sat down, I had underlined the name with my finger and raised an eyebrow.

“Not a problem,” he had said. “Trust me.”

What choice did I have?

T
HE PREVIOUS
day, the third of the trial, Nelson had presented his opening statement, what Gage described as a road map of the state's case, a case that was in Gage's view circumstantial at best. Nelson had asked the jury to keep an open mind and had laid out the foundation of his case. After the first series of You are going to hear… and You are going to see…, I had found myself drifting
off, strangely unconnected to it all, as if it were happening to another woman, as if I had shut down. During the following days, that would happen a fair bit. One moment I would be listening to testimony, and a few minutes later I would be thinking about a movie I'd seen or a book I'd read the summer before or a pattern I was considering for a new necklace I'd been commissioned to make. So the morning session had passed, and at noon, Judge Savage had adjourned so she could finish up some old business in the afternoon.

N
OW, ON
the fourth day, I still felt numb as Gage ushered me into a conference room and closed the door. “How ya doing?” he asked. “You okay? Sorry about that mess outside. I'll get that straightened out.” He strutted around the room in that roosterlike way some short men possess. “It's the goddamned media. You better start praying for a high-profile murder in the statehouse or a natural disaster or a scandal with cocaine or call girls in the governor's office, get them off our back and on to the next dog and pony show.”

Days before the trial, he warned me the media would be tough because it would draw attention to the case, and what we wanted was to slip under the radar. Without the media, everyone would be happy if the case just disappeared. (“To tell you the truth,” Gage said one night, “Nelson would like this case to dry up and go away. It's a no-win.”) But with press attention, everything had changed. “The case got sex appeal” was how Gage put it now. A handsome young man dying of cancer. A pretty young defendant (Gage's words). A grieving mother. A young daughter. And of course the hot-button issue of assisted suicide. Or manslaughter, depending on which paper you read. For Nelson, it had become a high-profile prosecution right before an election. “It's all about politics,” Gage said. “It's always about politics. Never forget that.”

“So here's what's happening today,” he was saying. “The DA will start calling his witnesses. Most of them will be familiar to you.” He checked a paper. “The first one on Nelson's list is the State Police
lieutenant who headed the investigation first,” he said. “Lieutenant Moody. You remember him?”

I nodded. As if I could forget.

There was a rap on the door.

“Come,” Gage barked.

A court officer poked his head in. “The judge is ready,” he said.

U
NTIL THE ARRAIGNMENT,
I had never been inside a courtroom in my life. (I had never even had a parking ticket, a fact that failed to impress either the prosecutor or the people picketing outside in the parking lot.) But by the second day of the trial, I had come to know every detail of the courtroom. It smelled like all other public buildings of a certain age—old shellac, dust, dreariness—and held the same faded but stately grandeur. The furniture was heavy, and four chandeliers hung from the frescoed ceiling; there were oil portraits of men hanging on the butter yellow walls and a grandfather clock by the judge's bench. Floral print carpeting covered the floors. The only odd note was a large gold cod that hung suspended from the ceiling. “The official state fish,” Gage explained.

Back on Tuesday, Judge Savage had laid out the ground rules. One pool camera for the media. Everyone was to remain seated during the proceedings, and there was to be no standing at the back of the room or on the spiral stairs that led to the balcony. If a spectator was unable to find a seat, he had to leave, an announcement that had resulted in a throng of people crowding the corridors each day before the doors were opened. By the time the court convened each morning, the room was packed, every seat taken, including those in the balcony. Faye was there. And Ben and Muriel and Gordon. The others in my hospice group had stayed away.

This morning, the judge nodded to the bailiff, and the jury was ushered in. They were serious, stiff, and self-conscious. Several of the men wore jackets and neckties. At one time or another, each of
them looked over at me with some curiosity. When one juror caught me looking at her, she averted her eyes, as if we had been caught doing something illegal. Mrs. Martha Anderson, mother of the deceased son, sat in the chair designated for the foreperson. Once they were settled in, the judge leaned her arms on the bench and peered out over the courtroom. She was easily the smallest person in the room—Gage told me that she sat on a stack of phone books—and if you passed her on the street, you might think she was a widow, someone who had never worked outside the home, but up there behind her bench, there was no doubt about her power. She turned to the DA.

“Mr. Nelson, is the commonwealth ready to proceed?”

“We are, Your Honor.”

“You may call your first witness.”

Nelson stood up. “The state calls Lieutenant Ralph Moody.”

The bailiff left and moments later returned through a side door by the jury box with Moody, who was sworn in and seated. He was dressed in a navy suit, a little tight through the shoulders, and looked larger than I remembered.

“Would you please state your name and spell your last name for the record?” Nelson said.

“Lieutenant Ralph Moody, Moody.”

“Where do you reside?”

“Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts.”

“Lieutenant Moody, what is your occupation?”

“I am a State Police detective.”

“For how long?”

“Approximately fourteen years.”

I kept my hands folded in my lap, and I could see the pulse throbbing against my inner wrist. I fixed my attention on the witness stand, but in my peripheral vision, I was aware of one of the reporters sketching my profile. My cheeks flushed. My mouth went dry, in spite of the Xanax I'd taken earlier without telling Gage.

Speaking clearly and precisely and without referring to notes,
Nelson led Moody through his opening testimony. Moody told the jury that the commonwealth gave the DA's office the authority to investigate any unattended death and that he was an officer in the detective bureau assigned to the district attorney's office. He explained that earlier in the summer, the DA's office had received a call from the Chatham Police asking them to investigate the unattended death of a man named Luke Ryder.

“And did you respond to that call?”

“I did.”

“Please tell the jury what you did.”

“I went to the deceased's home on Sea Harbor Lane in West Chatham.”

“And what did you discover about the deceased?”

“I learned that the deceased, Luke Ryder, had been dying of cancer.”

“So what was your reaction to being called in to investigate?”

“I would say I was somewhat surprised.”

“Did the Chatham Police give any further explanation as to why they had called you?”

“Yes. According to the officer, a member of the deceased's immediate family was convinced he had been given an overdose of morphine.”

“Did the officer tell you who that was?”

“Yes. The deceased's daughter.”

“And what did you do then?”

“I, along with State Police detective Peter Sakolosky, carried out a preliminary investigation.”

“Please tell the jury what that involved.”

“We called in Crime Scene Services. We videotaped the scene and took photos.”

In response to Nelson's questions, Lieutenant Moody walked the jury through his procedure, explaining how the investigators had looked at the medications, written down the prescription strength, counted the pills. “We called the doctor who prescribed them, then
bagged them as evidence. There was a morphine drip by the patient's bed, and we took that, too. We also checked and bagged the trash. We took down the names of anyone who had seen the deceased or been inside the house within the last twenty-four hours.”

“What were you looking for?”

“Syringe, any meds not prescribed, any signs of a discarded package or empty vials or IV bags.”

“Did you find anything?”

“Yes, sir. We found a single plastic bag in the garbage by the deceased's bed.”

“What did you do with that?”

“We bagged it and brought it to the station.”

“And what did you do next?”

“We interviewed several people who had seen the deceased prior to his death.”

“And was the defendant one of the people you interviewed?”

“Yes, she was.”

“Do you see the defendant in the courtroom today?”

“Yes, sir. I do.”

“Would you point her out and describe her for the court?”

Moody raised an arm and pointed at me. “She is the redhead in the tan suit sitting next to the defense attorney.”

“May the record indicate that Lieutenant Moody has identified the defendant, Jessica Long?”

“Yes, it may,” Savage said.

The swooshing of my heart pounded in my ears like surf, and I grew light-headed. I swallowed and silently intoned a litany. Don't faint. Don't faint. Don't faint. That moment, with Moody singling me out, I knew terror, deep and pure and nothing like the anxiety I had until then thought was fear. This—this icy clutch of dread—was true fear.

“And what, if any, was the defendant's relationship to the deceased?”

“She was his hospice volunteer.”

“Now, during your initial interview with the defendant,” Nelson continued, “did you ask the defendant if Luke Ryder had ever discussed the possibility of suicide?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said he never had.”

“So, at this point, what were you thinking?”

“I had an open mind, but in the initial inquiry, we found nothing to substantiate the relative's accusation.”

“But you kept the investigation open?”

“Yes.”

“Why is that?”

“We continued to receive calls from the deceased's family. Particularly from his daughter.”

Nelson looked down at his notes. “And that would be Miss Paige Ryder?”

“Yes, sir. She continued to insist that her father's death was not due to normal causes. She insisted that the police request an autopsy.”

“And did you?”

“We told her that, as part of the investigation, we had sent urine and blood to the state crime lab and had requested a full toxicology report. We also sent the bottles of medications and the plastic bag we retrieved from the scene.”