A Question of Mercy (29 page)

The prosecutor asked if it looked like Adam had been hit or struck in any way.

“Couldn't say. He was pretty beat up, but I couldn't say how.”

“He looked beat up?” said the prosecutor. “You could say that for sure?”

“Yeah. I can say that. His head looked caved in.”

Clementine made a small, high sound in her throat. Everyone heard it.

The prosecutor sat down and Strickland walked quickly toward Mr. Coe as though this wouldn't take long and he wasn't going to waste the judge's time. “Are you saying he looked damaged in a way that was not from normal river damage? Or are you saying he might have been beat up by a person?

“No. I can't say that. I don't know. I'm just saying he'd been washed a lot of miles, and maybe the river rocks were hard on him.”

When Mr. Coe left the stand, Jess asked Strickland if Coe's testimony had worked against her. Strickland shook his head to reassure her.

The prosecutor called the medical examiner next. The examiner described the broken bones, the damaged head, the body water-logged and bloated. He named the cause of death as drowning. When Strickland questioned him, the examiner testified to the fact that the absence of bruises on the body meant that Adam was already dead when his head was bashed in. “Since there is no blood flow after death occurs, or drowning in this case, there can be no bruising.”

Jess found the medical examiner's formal description of Adam easier to listen to than the testimony of Bobby Coe. She kept seeing Adam lying on the bank, his shirt torn, his arms and legs sprawled into peculiar angles; she saw his mouth and ears filled with mud, his hair flat on his caved-in head. She saw the details clearly, as if she had been there herself, standing beside Bobby Coe. But she had not been there. She had gone far away.

The prosecutor called Clementine Finney to the stand, and she sat straight-backed in her chair, tucking strands of hair under her small hat, her freckles visible in the courtroom light. She wore a gray dress and a jacket with braids at the cuffs and collar. Her waist, cinched with a wide belt, made her look cut in two. Her hands stayed folded on her lap, her legs crossed at the ankles and neatly placed underneath her chair.

The prosecutor asked her to tell them about Adam.

“He was a good boy. His real daddy, Calder Finney, left when Adam was six years old. When the doctor explained to us about Adam's limitations,
Calder decided he had to leave. He just left.” She snapped her fingers, one hand rising like a small bird from her lap.

“How did Adam feel about Jess?” the prosecutor asked.

“Oh, he loved Jess. She was real good to him.” She pretended to be praising Jess. “Jess could have told Adam to do anything, and he would've done it. She could have told him to drown himself, and he would've done it. Just because she said to.” She turned toward Jess, her eyes like burning coals.

“Jess thought you should not put Adam in the Cadwell Institution. Is that right?”

“She made it real clear that she did not want him to go.” Clementine's face looked nervous and drawn. “She said he would be better off dead. She said that to me and to Edward Booker.” She sighed. “My decision was not easy. I was more afraid of Adam ending up in jail than anything else. I couldn't think about him going to jail. He wouldn't have understood.”

“And you believe Jess Booker assisted in Adam's drowning? Even urged him toward that end?”

Clementine looked down into a handkerchief that she kept wadded in her hands. “That's what I'm saying. She could have told him to do anything. He would have done it.”

The prosecutor turned the questioning over to Strickland.

“Mrs. Finney,” Strickland began. “Or should I call you Mrs. Booker?” Clementine said that, though she and Mr. Booker were married, she had kept the name Finney because it was Adam's name.

Strickland continued. “Had Jess ever urged Adam before this time to do anything that was harmful? To himself or to anyone else?”

“Not that I know of.” Clementine didn't look up. “I don't know what she did.”

“Why exactly had you decided to send Adam to Cadwell?”

“He was getting out of control. We tried everything. He was bothering little girls at the playground. Scaring them. And their parents.”

“Had you ever discussed sex with Adam?” Strickland asked.

“Well, no. He wouldn't understand. I told him what
not
to do.”

“Did people in the community report his behavior to the police?”

“A few times they did.” Clementine worked her handkerchief with her fingers.

“Have you ever been told that Adam would have the same sexual feelings as any other boy his age?”

“I guess that's true. That's what the doctors told me.”

“So it would have been helpful, don't you think, to have explained some of those feelings to him?”

Clementine held tight to the arms of the chair and scooted forward, rising slightly. “I get so tired of people knowing what I should have done with Adam. I loved him. They were going to put him in jail.” She began to sob and couldn't stop.

Judge Horn called for a short recess, informing the witness that she would be called back to the stand after ten minutes.

After the break Strickland spoke softly, “Just a few more questions, then we'll be through, Mrs. Finney.” He turned away from her. “Adam knew that he would be leaving soon for the Cadwell Institution. Is that correct?”

“Yes, he knew.” Clementine braced herself.

“And he knew that his life—instead of being at home with you where he had always been—was going to change? He knew because he had already received several shock treatments at Cadwell?”

Clementine did not answer.

“Is that right?”

“I guess he knew.” Her body suddenly looked bent at an angle.

“Did he beg not to go?”

“He had almost stopped begging, but sometimes at night he …”

“He begged you not to send him away?”

“He didn't understand, you see. I told him and told him. I said, ‘Adam, we don't have a choice.' He never understood.”

Strickland leaned in close. “Had you already discussed an operation with the doctors at Cadwell? The castration procedure, I mean. And had you talked to the doctors about the possibility of a lobotomy?”

“Well, it wasn't for sure.” She put her handkerchief to her mouth and twisted sideways in the witness chair. She wanted to leave.

“In fact,” Strickland urged, “didn't you sign papers giving the doctors permission for whatever procedure they thought best?”

“I had to. I had to sign, or they wouldn't take him.” She was whispering.

Sometimes, at night, Jess had seen Clementine in Adam's room, sitting on his bed, her hand on his chest. They were whispering. Adam had told Jess that on those nights his mama could “talk him back to himself.” He said that if he got lost in his head, she could talk him back and make him feel good again. She had always done this. But today was the first time Jess had seen how scared she was. She marveled that she had not seen it before.

“So you knew exactly what Adam would face when he entered the Cadwell Institution. Mrs. Finney, did you know that in some states those practices have been declared against the law?”

“I didn't know.” Her head rolled on her shoulders. “I told him we would visit him.”

“But he knew, didn't he?” Strickland paused. “That he wouldn't come home again.”

“Stop! Stop it!” Clementine wrapped her arms around her waist. She began to yell. “We had no choice. Jail or Cadwell. That's all there was.” She suddenly raised the handkerchief in mid-air, and shivered like a child.

Clementine tried to stand up, but fell back into her chair. “For me, Cadwell was the only thing to do. Even though … even though.” She did not finish. She coughed and strangled back a sob, then turned to face the judge. “He was my son, Judge. He was my only boy.”

They broke for lunch, and when they returned, at two o'clock, Strickland called Rick Blalock to the stand.

“What is your line of business, Mr. Blalock?” Strickland asked.

“I own Rick's Garage in Goshen,” Blalock said.

“And what was your relationship to Adam Finney?”

“Adam got hubcaps from me. Been doing that for years. Most of his collection came from the ones I helped find. If I saw an unusual hubcap, I thought of Adam and took it over to his house.”

“You delivered hubcaps to his house?”

Jess wondered where this was going. She turned to look at her father and Sam sitting beside him. He didn't know either.

“A few times. That's what I was doing one day last March when Adam answered the door. He looked terrible and I asked if he was sick. He said he'd been drinking poison.”

“He said the word ‘poison'?”

“Yes, sir. He showed me the bottle he got from under the sink.” Rick Blalock turned toward the Judge. “Cleaner. A bottle of Clorox or ammonia, something. He started vomiting. Right there in the hallway.”

“What did you do?” Strickland asked.

“I drove him to the emergency room. They pumped out his stomach.” Rick Blalock touched his neck. “His throat was pretty bad damaged, I think.”

“Where was his mother?”

“She was at the grocery store. When she showed up at the hospital, she told me I should leave. She said not to tell anybody about it. So I didn't until now.”

“Why are you saying this now?”

“Because the poison thing happened in March, a few weeks before he was supposed to go away. So maybe Adam did want to hurt himself. I didn't want Jess blamed for something she didn't do.”

Jess had never heard about Adam's emergency trip to the hospital, but now she remembered a day when her father called her at school, saying that Adam had been taken to the doctor for a bad stomach-ache. From her father's choice of words, Jess suspected that he, too, had not known the seriousness of that episode.

James Strickland offered Blalock's testimony as proof that Adam had been capable of taking his own life and that he had tried to do so in this earlier instance. The prosecutor requested a break, so that the prosecution could change the charge from involuntary manslaughter to helping a minor commit suicide, which was illegal in North Carolina. He believed, he said, that even though Adam was twenty years old, he could still be considered a minor—both mentally and emotionally.

Strickland called other witnesses who described a strong friendship between Jess and Adam. Her father testified that Jess had taken care of Adam—how, at first, she had resented his presence in the house, but that after a year they were a close brother-sister team. He claimed that Jess would never hurt him. One teacher mentioned that Jess had brought Adam to a school dance. “She spent all week teaching him basic dance steps, then she urged the other girls to dance with him. Adam said it was the best night of his life.”

Then Strickland called Jess to take the stand. She wore a light blue sleeveless dress that hit just below her knees. Her shoes were blue leather with a small heel that accentuated the calves of her legs. Her slim white arms moved gracefully at her side.

Strickland approached the chair. “Did you ever hear Adam beg not to go to Cadwell?”

“Almost every night,” Jess said. “Before he went to bed. He begged and cried. He knew he would get electric shock treatments. Once, they put him in a coma. They did these things to get rid of his desire for girls.”

“Were his desires getting out of hand?”

“They thought so. But Adam never did anything bad, not really. Still, they were going to operate on him.”

“By operate, you mean castration? Was this operation already planned?”

“Yes. Clementine told me she had to sign the papers. I couldn't stand to think about it. They were treating him like an animal.”

“Jess, since we already know that Adam had been sexually aggressive toward little girls at the playground,” Strickland said, “did he ever behave sexually toward you?

“No, no. We were buddies. At the playground he pulled up the dress of a little girl, and he tried to kiss another, but he wouldn't have hurt them. And he would never have tried to hurt me. My daddy told me that they would
have to lock him up if he couldn't control himself. It wasn't fair. He liked to hug people. He even hugged the men at the auto supply places.”

“Did you think he would choose death over the life he would have at Cadwell?”

“It wasn't death he wanted. He just didn't want to go to Cadwell. We went to the river on that last day, but Adam went in too far …” She paused. “Adam didn't want to go where nobody cared for him. One time when he went for a shock treatment, I went along. I saw people walking in the halls. They were strange and sleepy. I saw one woman tied to her bed. When Adam came out he looked like those people.”

“But, in your opinion, did Adam understand the consequence of going into the river? With his clothes on?”

“He wanted to say goodbye to the river. He'd done that before. He loved the river like it was a person.”

At that moment Jess saw, in the back of the courtroom, a man leaning casually against the wall. She recognized his hat. The man from the brown and white car. She made a small sound in her throat and Strickland came close. He stood directly in front of her, wanting to block her view. He couldn't tell what she was looking at, but he could see that something had disturbed her.

“Do you think Adam understood what he was doing?” Strickland repeated.

“Yes. I think he understood,” Jess said. “Because when he asked me to come into the river with him I said, ‘No.' I didn't say anything but ‘No.' I think he knew then.”

“Did he say he knew?”

“No, but he said he wouldn't have to go to Cadwell now. He said he wouldn't have to wear the helmet that hurt his head. He said he could ride all the way to the ocean.”