The Sabbathday River (66 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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“Officer Erroll, have you not just admitted that you committed perjury in this courtroom?”
“I admit that,” Nelson said sadly.
“You lied. You sat in that very chair and you lied.”
“Yes.”
“And yet now you wish us to believe that you are telling the truth. Before, you lied, but you're not lying now!”
Nelson sighed. He did not respond.
“How are we supposed to believe what you say, Officer Erroll?”
“You can believe what you want,” Nelson said sadly. “My conscience is clear now. I've admitted what I did wrong.” He paused. “You said it yourself, Robert. If you hide guilt, it destroys you, but if you admit it, it makes you strong. Isn't that what you said?”
“There is nothing to admit!” Charter thundered. “And you are a perjurer!”
“Yes,” Nelson agreed.
In the jury box, heads were shaking. How Naomi wanted it to be over.
“I will not cross-examine an admitted perjurer!”
“That is your option,” Hayes snapped. “So sit down.”
Charter looked at him in surprise. He sat. Nelson nodded at Judith, then walked out of the aisle. Heather, tall in her seat, turned to watch him leave.
“Mrs. Friedman, your next witness?”
Judith stood. She faced the back of the room. “The defense calls Chris Flynn.”
There was a shriek of breath inhaled, the sudden, collective suck of air into shocked mouths and throats, leaving nothing behind. Even Charter was limp for a moment, but when he finally moved he moved quickly.
“This is …” He was up on his feet, waving his arms as if trying to flag a speeding car. “This is outrageous. We had no warning of this!”
“Of what?” Judith said mildly. “We were able to find the witness you told us you were looking for. So you should be happy.”
“Mr. Charter,” said the judge, “what is the nature of your objection?”
Naomi, stunned and exhilarated, began to grin. This, evidently, was what Judith meant by “lots of fun.”
“I …” He could not seem to find words to contain his protest. That she had found the person whom he knew did not exist? That this person had materialized to say he did not exist? That in a world full of artificial Christopher Flynns there might, incredibly, be a real one?
Charter, unable to complete his sentence, sat down.
“Chris Flynn,” the court reporter said through the open back door.
The occupant of each seat turned to look. Naomi, confronted with the impending entrance of the man, found that in his physical absence she had imagined him quite clearly as a tall and imposing person with blond hair and broad shoulders—an athlete—and it occurred to her that everyone must by now have an image of how he must look, based on nothing but a name. But there was no broad and tall man, only someone else, a latecomer looking for a seat, moving down the aisle. Naomi went back to staring at the door. The latecomer was nearly at the front of the room before she saw her mistake.
It was a young girl, twenty or so, and tiny. She wore a bizarre outfit comprising a white turtleneck imprinted with small green frogs under a mostly pink Fair Isle sweater, khaki pants, and penny loafers. Her blond hair was held back with a velvet-covered band, wedged over the top of her head and then pushed slightly forward, so the hair was mounded over itself, over air. A gold ring on a gold chain bounced against her flat chest. She looked about her somewhat fearfully and gave Judith a downright terrified nod when she got to the front of the room. Judith pointed at the witness chair.
“Please state your name for the record,” the court officer said.
“My name is Christina Flynn.” Her voice was high and little.
Again, Charter leaped to his feet. “Your honor, I don't appreciate these theatrics. I don't know what Ms. Friedman hopes to prove by this, but a Christina is not a Christopher.”
Hayes looked at Judith, but he was way ahead of Charter.
“Neither is a Chris necessarily a Christopher,” said Judith. “The word in the address book was Chris, not Christopher.”
“So it was,” Hayes said. “You may proceed, Mrs. Friedman.”
Charter sank to his chair.
“Christina, what is your occupation?” Judith moved close to her. The girl looked as if she needed the support.
“I'm a junior at Dartmouth College. I'm majoring in English.”
“When did you enter Dartmouth?”
“The fall of 1983.” She kept her eyes glued to Judith's face. “I grew up in Virginia, but I wanted to go to school in the Northeast. My father went to Dartmouth.”
Judith nodded. “When you arrived on the campus for your freshman year, were you assigned to a dormitory?”
“Yes.” Christina Flynn blushed. “My father wanted me to be in an all-female dormitory. I was in North Massachusetts Hall. Fourth floor. There were two other girls in my room.”
“How many girls were in North Massachusetts Hall, Christina?”
She thought. “About fifty. Maybe a few less.”
“And of those, how many would have been freshman girls like you?”
“Maybe twenty. Upper-class women sometimes move off campus or into sorority houses.”
“I see.” Judith smiled. “Do you remember meeting a freshman woman named Heather Pratt at the beginning of the fall term? She would have just moved into North Massachusetts Hall, like you.”
Christina Flynn shook her head vigorously. “No. I mean, possibly I did meet her. They had parties for the new girls in the common room. But I don't remember meeting her. I've tried, but I don't remember.”
“Okay,” said Judith. “Christina, do you remember buying a new address book for yourself when you arrived at college for your freshman year?”
She bit her lip. “I really don't remember. I know you asked me before, but I don't remember. I might have.”
Judith went to the evidence table. Under Charter's apathetic gaze, she found the address book in its plastic bag. “An address book like this?”
Christina took it. Naomi saw recognition fall over her face. “Oh … I think I did. I remember buying this at the Dartmouth bookstore!”
Judith turned it over in Christina's hands. “This thing on the cover? What is it?”
“It's the college crest. It says
Vox Clamantis in Deserto.
It means ‘A voice crying out in the wilderness.'”
“Did you write your name inside, Christina?”
“I don't know. Maybe.”
Slipping the address book from its plastic bag, Judith opened its green cover. She showed it to the girl. “Did you write this?”
Now Christina blushed again, even more fiercely. Naomi thought she looked as if she might cry.
“Yes. That's my writing.”
“But it's not exactly your name, is it, Christina?”
“No,” she said, ducking her head. “I thought … This is embarrassing.”
“It's all right,” said Judith. “It's important.”
“I thought, when I went to college, I might try not to be so … In high school I was shy. And I'd never really been away from home before. And my family. And everybody I knew always called me Christina. Except my father. He calls me Tina. And I thought maybe now that I was in a place where nobody knew me, I could start with a new name. But I didn't, really. I mean, I'm still Christina and everybody still calls me Christina.” She looked at Judith. “I don't really remember any of this. I mean, it was two and a half years ago. I don't remember losing my address book.”
“But, looking at it, you do recognize that this was once yours,” Judith said gently.
“Yes,” Christina said. “It was mine.”
“You are the Chris Flynn whose name is written in this address book.”
She sighed. She would never be that Chris Flynn now, Naomi knew. “Yes,” the girl said.
Judith faced the jury. “Christina, how did you first learn about the case on trial in this courtroom?”
She took hold of the ring around her neck and fiddled with it nervously. “I think one of my sorority sisters mentioned it. She was my roommate freshman year, in North Mass. She asked if I remembered this girl Heather who dropped out during freshman week. I didn't remember. She didn't remember her, either,” Christina said, a little defensively. “And the rest of it, I mean, what the trial was about, I didn't know that part till you called me yesterday. I didn't know till yesterday.”
“So as far as you were concerned, this girl Heather and the crime for which she was on trial had absolutely nothing to do with you?”
She looked at Judith in intense alarm. “No! It has nothing to do with me! I don't know anything about it!”
“And how did you learn that Heather Pratt was alleged to have had a child with a person named Chris Flynn, an allegation that arose entirely from an address book you had once lost?”
Now she did cry, quite suddenly, with one hand pressed to her nose, her cheeks flushed deeply red. Beneath her fingers, her skin had a sheen of running tears. “Please!” She wept. “I don't know anything about this! I don't know her! I don't even recognize her—is that her?” She pointed at Heather, who now, for the first time, had turned to Charter with a look of unmistakable triumph. “I don't remember her at all if that's her. Please”—she choked—“can I leave now? I don't know anything about dead babies!”
Judith looked at Hayes. “I'm finished,” she said mildly.
Charter was asked if he had questions, and he rose and swayed for a moment, eyeing the by now sobbing girl in the frog-covered turtleneck: Chris Flynn. He lifted one finger, as if to point it in accusation, but there was too much laughter, and the sound of the laughter first competed with and then muted the tears of Christina Flynn. In the jury box they were not successful in silencing the laughter, and in the spectator
seats they were not trying. Even Heather laughed. Naomi, watching the sad little girl in the witness seat, did not laugh. Charter had no questions. Christina Flynn walked away, wiping at her face with the back of her small hand.
“Your next witness, Mrs. Friedman?” said Judge Hayes.
Judith stood. She was going to call Heather now, Naomi knew—call her and make her recite her lines of denial:
My baby was stillborn,
I
don't know anything about the other baby
—but Judith wasn't talking. She stood transfixed, buoyed by the laughter, suppressed and unsuppressed. She looked at the jury box, letting her eye run over the men and women, their rhythmic shoulders and red, merry faces and shaking heads. Then at Charter, who was still and sagging in his chair. Then at Heather, who looked back at her, pleading and waiting. And finally at Hayes again.
“The defense rests,” she said.
 
ON GOOD FRIDAY morning, Gilman Warren, the Attorney General of New Hampshire, made his first and only appearance at the trial of NH v.
Pratt,
sitting not near Charter but rather noncommittally in the back of the room to watch the final arguments. The jury was out for thirty minutes. Twenty-five of them, Naomi later learned, were spent waiting for the right form to fill out.
They made their way outside in a kind of rugby scrum around Heather, half-pressing, half-lifting her ahead through the people, Naomi and Judith on either side, Ella and her squadron of triumphant women running interference before. The cheer that rose to meet them interrupted Attorney General Warren's speech to the cameras, and he turned them a grim face.
“Will you be remounting an investigation into the death of the Sabbathday River baby?” somebody shouted over the din.
Charter, leaning out in front, spoke with bitter restraint. “We had the right person on trial,” he said, glaring at Heather.
“Mr. Warren? Is that your statement?”
The attorney general spoke into a brush of microphones.
“I think we're all glad to put this sad case behind us,” he said, his voice oddly still. “We will not try any part of it again. And that is my statement. Thank you.” Then, leaving Charter motionless in his wake and cast adrift, Warren moved away down the steps.
Naomi, watching him leave, thought at first that he must be truly, personally, bereft, so utterly was the sound of weeping enmeshed and in sync with his descent, and this is why nearly a minute had passed before she understood that it was actually Judith who wept, and not loudly at all but in a free way, and close by. She turned to Judith and saw that she had covered her face, like that day on the bench, but Naomi felt as helpless now as then. “Oh, Judith,” she said, and in reaching for her she took her hand off Heather's wrist. The crowd came up around them, pushing at Heather, surging in a wave of white. Naomi felt herself take an involuntary step away. Then, this time by choice, a second step. The bodies of strangers pushed her in a different direction. Someone thrust a mass of roses into Heather's arms.

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