The Sabbathday River (25 page)

Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River

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“We have a tape recorder in the office.” Erroll spoke for the first time. “I couldâ”

“No,” said Charter. “Not necessary.” He turned back to Heather. “Your baby died.”

“It was a miscarriage,” she said, because it had been, sort of. That was how she had come to think of it, these past weeks. A miscarriage of life. Wasn't any death really a miscarriage of life?

“And this occurred when?” he said, nodding slightly, as if he were only sympathizing with her.

“Oh, a while back. Few months? Maybe. I don't really remember. It was summer, anyway.”

The pen waited. “In the summer,” he mused.

“I was â¦ I had it in the toilet. I felt sick in the middle of the night, so I went to the toilet and it â¦ came out. I felt terrible,” she said, a little desperately.

“I'm sure you did,” Charter said. “Can we go back, please?”

Back, Heather thought dimly. There was no back.

“When did you discover you were pregnant with this second child?”

“Just after â¦” Just after her life had tacked in its course, she thought. Just after Pick had fallen asleep on the living-room couch and never wakened. Just after Ashley had told her she wasn't strong enough to take him from his wife. Just after the before of her life had ended and the after had begun. “I don't know exactly,” she said instead. “January?”

“And whom did you tell about this pregnancy?”

She had told no one, but he knew this already. Not the midwife, not Stephen Trask or Celia Trask, not Naomi Roth, who had thought she was such a good example to her daughter. Certainly not Ashley, who turned away from her now when they met, who crushed her heart with his jagged indifference. The truth was she had barely told herself about the baby inside her, there was so much mourning in the aftermath of that night. The baby, set ticking by so much sadness, was like a measure of the reach of that sadness out of the past, and it only got bigger instead of lessening and loosening its grip on her. She might have been getting better, but it only grew, taking up space and reminding her of what she
had lost. She could not bear to think about it, but when she did it was with bitter resentment; how much more had she wanted back the things that had left her life, in place of this thing that had come?

“I'm not really close to too many people that way,” she said now. “I can't think of anyone I told.”

“That's a shame,” said Charter. “And you didn't go see a doctor either, is that right? Good mother like you?”

“I felt fine,” Heather said. “I did.”

“Until your miscarriage, that is.”

She looked up at him. “Yes. Until then.”

“And you can't remember when that was, exactly?”

“No.” She looked for the crumb. It was still there. Staring at it helped her avoid his eyes.

“Could it have been more recent than the summer? Last month or so, for example?”

Heather shrugged.

“Like, during your stomach flu, maybe? When you did all that throwing up and lost all that weight you never lost from having your fourteen-month-old daughter?”

She swallowed. “I really need to go to the bathroom.”

Erroll started to get to his feet.

“Answer the question!” Charter shouted.

Heather's eyes filled with tears. “Yes. Sure,” she choked. “Now can I go?”

“Take her,” he said nonchalantly. He was writing. Erroll opened up the door and waited for her to come around the table.

The station was quiet but not empty. A policeman she recognized from her house was leaning against the wall of the corridor, merely watching her. Others were in a room she passed, talking softly, even laughing, drinking coffee, but not precisely
doing
anything. As if they were waiting, she thought vaguely, which was of course exactly what they were doing. They were waiting for her. The bathroom was on the other side of the entrance area, a single stall in a little room, not designated for men or women. Erroll reached in and turned on the light. He wouldn't let her shut the door all the way.

“I'll just stand here,” he said, as if that were completely normal.

She was too tired to argue. She went into the stall and pulled down her pants, checking reflexively for blood, but there hadn't been blood
for a few days now. She wondered when she would stop checking, or whether she would ever stop checking. She barely felt the relief of her bladder letting go. She could sleep, almost, or not so much sleep as just fall away from herself, right here. After a while they would come in and get her.

It had been stupid to say she'd had the baby in the toilet. You couldn't flush a baby that big awayâthey knew that, of courseâso there was nothing gained by doing it. She still would have had to take the baby out of the toilet and put it somewhere. Charter would ask about that next. She had to use this time. This time out of his sight was precious. She had to think what to say when he asked her.

“You all right in there?” Erroll said.

Heather shuddered. She could barely remember what she had said already. She couldn't imagine what she would say next.

He walked her back to the room, back through the gauntlet of attendant policemen. She wondered where they had all come from. As far as she knew, Goddard itself only had one, or maybe two. When Erroll pushed back the door, Charter had a form in front of him, flat atop the manila files. He was tapping it with his fingers.

“Like to send some of these men out to your place,” he told Heather without preamble. “Just informal. To have a look around.”

“But why?” she said. “What are you looking for?”

“Oh, nothing in particular,” he said evenly. “Like I said, it's just informal. You'll need to sign, though.”

“Sign what?”

He held it up, from where he sat, as if she could read that far.

“Shouldn't I have a lawyer if I need to sign something?” she asked.

“Oh, I don't see why,” said Charter. “A miscarriage isn't against the law. Maybe a doctor, sure, but I don't see what a lawyer can do about a miscarriage.”

“Can I see it?” Heather said.

He slid it across the table. It gave the police permission to search her house for any materials or objects relevant to the investigation. For the first time since she had told him about the baby, her heart leaped a little. She knew there was nothing to find.

“I'll sign this,” Heather said. He skitted his pen across the table, and she did. Charter handed the sheet to Erroll, who went out.

“I'd like to talk a little more about the baby,” he said when they were alone again. “Bet you felt pretty bad about having a miscarriage.”

“I did,” Heather said.

“Especially when the baby was so far along.”

She shrugged. She didn't really think it mattered how far along it was.

“So â¦ what did you do when it happened?”

Heather thought. She couldn't think. “I don't really remember,” she said finally.

“You don't remember,” Charter echoed. “You don't remember what you did with the body of your baby.”

The miscarriage, she noted dully, had become a dead baby. It seemed not much of a difference. Not worth fighting over, anyway.

“Well, I was upset. It was the middle of the night. I don't really remember.”

“You remember it was the middle of the night, but you don't remember what you did with the body of your baby.”

He regarded her.

“Did you, for example, take it out of the toilet?”

“Well, I must have.” She tried to smile. “I mean, I couldn't have left it there.”

He didn't smile back.

“But you don't exactly remember, because you were so upset.”

“I was upset,” she recalled.

“And maybe â¦ well, I'm just thinking aloud here. Stop me if I'm off track. I'm just thinking how I would maybe have felt about having the baby in the first place. Like, sad, for example. Maybe even angry. After all, you had a lot on your plate. You already had a little kid to take care of. You knew your boyfriend was off having kids with his own wife and wouldn't be around to help you. Plus your grandmother was gone. Understand she helped you out taking care of Polly. Freed you up in the afternoons, for example.”

Heather looked at him. She noted, with a whiff of pride, that she had passed beyond being insulted by him.

“And now that was all gone, and all you had was a dead baby in the toilet.”

“Miscarriage,” she muttered.

“Sure. But dead, right?”

“It was dead,” Heather confirmed.

“And you knew this for a fact, because â¦”

She gazed at him for a moment, uncomprehending.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it just occurs to me, you must have medical training of some kind, or you wouldn't be exactly qualified to pronounce a baby dead. But maybe I'm wrong.” He shrugged.

“It was
dead
!” Heather shouted.

“Yes,” said Charter. “But before you killed it? Or after?”

Her mouth went dry, thenâit felt likeâher whole head. She could not have spoken even if, by some extraordinary chance, she'd been able to think of what to say.

“That's the question,” Charter said. “That's what I'm wondering.”

“Listen to me,” said Heather, barely recognizing the steely timbre of her own apparent voice. “You can send every cop in New Hampshire to my house, but you're going to be pretty disappointed. There is no dead baby in my house.”

He gaped at her, sincerely amazed. “But of course there isn't, Miss Pratt. How could there be? Your baby daughter is in a freezer in Peytonville. And whenever you're ready to tell me how she got there, I'm ready to listen.”

Chapter 20

The Pound and River

AT SOME POINT THEY LET HER SLEEP. DOWN AT the other end of the building, as far as you could get from Erroll's office, which, given the size of the station house itself, wasn't all that far, was a single room. A cell, she supposed, numbly. Not that it mattered. She would have taken a box, just to get away from him.

The horror of what she'd been accused of doing refused to thoroughly sink in, but she hated him for saying it, nonetheless. For those first hours of the night they had remained this way, intractable on either side of the table, like heads of state who arrive at a negotiation determined not to negotiate. After a while, she simply refused to keep speaking, to answer even the most mundane of questions. Then she put her head down, literally, on her arms, and to even her own amazement fell promptly asleep. When she woke, it was because two men were half-leading, half-carrying her here.

The sleep was merciful, dreamless and opaque. She barely distinguished the little room with its steel-framed single bed and scratchy wool cover, but dove back into oblivion, refusing any stray fragments of
thoughtâher daughter, the unnamed babyâuntil she was numb and away. There was no clock in the room, of course. A policeman sat in a chair by the door, and the station was quiet. She hoped they would never come back.

When they came back, it was still night. Heather jerked awake, adrenaline rushing through her body. The man at her right elbow seemed angry. He gave a tug and she got unsteadily to her feet. He was a different manânot the one who had sat outside the door. He was one of the ones who had left to go to her house. She wondered how long they had let her rest.

Charter was back in the room, waiting for her, his thick back to the door. Erroll, who sat beside him, looked over his shoulder to give her a little smile when she reached the doorway. She walked around them, back to her place, without asking. The table was covered with objects, but she had to squint at them to see what they were because they were shiny from being put in plastic bags, the same zip-lock type Pick had used for freezing her applesauce. Heather peered at them and saw, to her mild curiosity, that they were all spikes. Long thin nails, some rusted; an awl with a faded wooden bulb; an ice pick with an apple-green handle, indistinguishable from her own, at home in the kitchen; and a metallic array of thin knitting needles, multicolored, just like the ones in Pick's sewing basket at home, sharp and glittery like pickup sticks. She had kept her basket by the couch, for her tools and whatever lovely thing she was making. Since Polly's quilt there hadn't been much. Her hands, she said, and she preferred to play with the baby. There was one sweater she did make, Heather remembered: lavender, with sweet white cuffs and collar, but Polly had already outgrown it and there wouldn't be anything more. Where was the basket now? It suddenly seemed awfully important to remember, but Heather couldn't remember.

“I hope you were able to rest,” Charter said. “I think you did need a rest.”

Heather looked at him.

“And you're ready to continue, I assume.”

Continue, she thought. She looked at the spikes.

“You recognize these?” he said evenly. “It's a lot to take in.”

She peered at them again. She wasn't sure she understood the question.

“Do I recognize them? They're all different. It's knitting needles and an ice pick.”

“Well, I'm glad you're not going to disagree with me about that,” he said genially.

“Are they mine?” Heather said. “Are they from my house?” She stood up and leaned forward across the table. A couple of them she didn't recognize. “Those aren't mine,” she said, pointing at the awl and some of the nails.

“They were all collected from your own home, within the past two hours.”

“Really?” Heather said, perplexed. It was possible, she supposed. After all, Pick had been much more handy than she. She never used half of Pick's things in the cellar, and she hadn't bothered to clean out the tool area, either. “Well, all right.”

“So then you agree that these are your things.”

“Do I
agree?”
Heather frowned. “Why are you asking me about this?” She felt disoriented now, as if she had missed some crucial turn in their drama. She had told him about the miscarriage, and he had accused her of killing her child. That was bad enough, but what did it have to do with spikes?

“It's important for us to know,” Charter said, his eyes on her face. “I know you don't really want to think about these things, and believe me, I promise I won't make you go over and over it. But we need to know exactly what happened, and that means we have to know which one of these you used. Or maybe the one you used isn't here at all. Maybe you put that one somewhere so you wouldn't have to see it. We need to know that, too.”

“Used,” said Heather, testing the word. “Used for what?”

He looked at her. His thick forefinger tapped the top of his file. The file, she noted vaguely, had grown.

“I used this one for defrosting the fridge,” she said, sounding, to her own ears at least, just the tiniest bit angry. Or was it desperate? “The nails and stuff I don't know. I'm not very handy. The knitting needles were Pâmy grandmother's.” Charter did not react. “See these? These are for big stitches, with wool. The littler ones make finer stitches. She made a sweater for Polly with them. It was a lavender sweater. It's already too small for Polly.” Even to her own ears she sounded strange, but she couldn't stop herself from talking. “Those”âshe pointedâ“were for
making socks. You use four of them. You make a triangle and the fourth is to knit.”

“I don't need knitting lessons,” he said sharply. “Which of these did you use to kill your baby?”

Instantly she was fully awake. “I didn't kill her,” Heather snapped.

Charter raised his eyebrows. “The baby had a stab wound, as you know.”

As she knew? Heather thought. Had Naomi said this to her? About the baby from the river?

“It was not an accidental stab wound. Unless”âhe leaned forwardâ“that is what you are telling us, Miss Pratt. That your baby's stab wound was somehow accidental?”

“I didn't stab her,” Heather said. “I
never â¦”
She stopped. Never, never. She couldn't.

“Are you unsure?” he asked. “Do you need to think?”

“No,” Heather said. “Look, you said a miscarriage wasn't a crime.”

“That's true,” he agreed.

“I never stabbed a baby. That wasn't my baby!”

He sighed deeply. “Don't you see that this isn't helping? You are only wasting your energy, Miss Pratt. My time, you're free to waste. I've got plenty. But your energy â¦ It seems a shame. We could be helping you, you see? We could be starting to do all the things we want to do to help you, but you are making it so hard for us. Please. Make up your mind to tell us only the truth from now on. We won't judge you.”

She looked into his face. His features were easy, untroubled. This, she saw, was only bureaucratic work for him. The period of his judgment was indeed long past, and there remained only the filling out of forms. He wouldn't stop until every line had its quota of confirmation.

“You're lying,” Heather said, enraged.

Charter leaned back in his chair. His face was tight, and beneath their ragged brows his gaze was tight, too, and fixed. “I'm lying,” he said carefully. “I'm lying.” He shook his head. “Do you know how long I have been doing this, Miss Pratt? Talking to people who are accused of crimes?”

“You said miscarriageâ” Heather shrieked.

“Not miscarriage. Murder. Murder, by stabbing, of an infant baby!” His ugly face was suddenly made more ugly by the blood beneath his white skin. Almost comical, she thought. Did he know he could change colors?

“I never!”

“Twenty-one years, Miss Pratt. As long as you've been alive. And here are three things I've learned about talking to people who are accused of crimes. Even in this big world, full of all kinds of people, there are three things that always happen when somebody's accused of a crime.” He was seething. She pictured his heart pumping rage into his voice. “First thing: they lie. Second thing: they lie. Third thing.” He glared at her. He slammed the table with the flat of his hand. “They
lie
!”

The sound took a long time to dissipate. No one spoke.

I want to go home
, she thought pointlessly. If they let her go home, she would stay there forever. She would never show her face. Surely that would be enough for what she'd done.

“Heather,” said a different voice. Heather looked up at Erroll. “You tell us. In your own words. I know you remember, and I know it hurts to remember. But you know we have to know.” He glanced at Charter. “We won't interrupt you. That seem fair?”

Fair? Heather thought. None of this was fair. They didn't know what it was like to be so weak your lover could no longer love you, or have a baby inside you whose face you couldn't bear imagining. They didn't know what it was like to be out there in the back field, in the night with all those stars watching to see what would happen.

“I'll tell you,” she heard herself say. “This is the truth.” She looked at Charter. Without taking his eyes from her, he felt for his pen.

“I was sleeping,” she started. She had no idea how she would tell this story. “It was the middle of the night. Tuesday night. Don't ask me what time, all right? And I woke up sick. I felt â¦ it wasn't like with Polly. It was just, like it was suddenly there. No preparation. I was just going to have it. And I wasn't ready, you know.” She looked at their faces. Charter was writing. “I hadn't told anyone, so I was by myself. I felt really hot. You remember,” she said, trying not to sound so ragged, “it was hot.”

“A couple weeks ago,” Erroll said. “Yes, it was pretty hot.”

“I just â¦ I suddenly didn't want to be in the house. I didn't want Polly to wake up and hear me. She can get out of the crib sometimes. I didn't want her to hear me and get out, and come in and see â¦” Heather shrugged. “So I went outside. It was cooler outside.” And the stars, she thought. Like bullet holes people up there were peeking through, watching her. “I didn't know what would happen. I never meant for anything bad to happen.”

“I'm sure that's true,” said Erroll. Then he waited for her to start again.

“I went down the hill. There's a pond back there at the bottom. Well, not a pond, really. It's mostly mud with a few big rocks around the edge. I don't know why I went there. I didn't plan that.” She looked at them. “I just was walking through the â¦ cramps. You know?” But they couldn't know, she thought bitterly. “And after a while, maybe a few minutes, like ten, down at the pond, I just felt like it was time to â¦” She stopped, suddenly embarrassed. Because it had felt just like going to the bathroom, really, and at the time she hadn't been sure it was the baby at all, only this other thing that she had to do before the baby could come out. “I got down,” she told them. “Like crouching, all right? And I pushed, and something came out. But I didn't realize it was the baby,” she said quickly. “I thought it might be â¦ something else.” She wasn't looking at Charter at all anymore. Erroll seemed intent. He nodded. “But I felt better, so I just stayed like that for a little while.” She closed her eyes. “I don't know how long. Because I thought if I moved, it would start the pains up again. And it was only after that I looked down and I saw the baby.”

Charter stopped. He looked up. His face was wooden.

“Your baby,” he said, after a moment.

“Yes.” Heather had tears in her eyes. She hadn't felt them come, but she felt them fall. “She was dead.”

He put his pen down.

“Just like that,” he observed.

Erroll turned to look at him.

“You're saying the baby was born dead,” said Charter. “I want to make sure I understand.”