Her Mother's Shadow (36 page)

S
he'd expected to have to talk to Zachary Pointer through a wall of Plexiglas, like they did in the movies, but when she arrived in the section of the prison where he was incarcerated, she was led directly to the chaplain's office.

“Reverend McConnell's not here today,” said the uniformed guard, his hand on the office door, “but he said Mr. Pointer and you could meet in here. Zach's already inside.”

Lacey felt unexpected fear rise up inside her. Being alone in a room with her mother's murderer suddenly seemed comparable to being trapped in a kennel with a vicious dog. Surely, though, they wouldn't let her meet with him if they had any doubts about her safety. Still, she hesitated before stepping inside the office.

“Go ahead in,” the guard said. “Just stop by the front to sign out when you leave.”

She opened the door and walked into a small, bare-walled waiting room containing five chairs upholstered in turquoise vinyl. Behind her, the guard closed the door and it felt as though he took all of the air in the room with him.

“Hello?” Lacey called.

She heard the sound of a chair scraping against the floor, and in a minute the man she had long despised stood in the doorway between the two rooms, wearing blue prison garb. She took an involuntary step backwards, but it was
his
face that turned ashen and held a look of fear.

“Annie?”
he asked.

Lacey couldn't speak. Why would he call her Annie? He hadn't known her mother as anything other than an obstacle in his path as he tried to kill his wife. She pictured him at the battered women's shelter, filling the doorway in his soaking-wet green peacoat. She remembered him pointing the gun, yelling “Whore!” and “Slut!” and she knew all at once it had not been Faye Collier that those words had been meant for.

“You were one of them,” she said with a calmness that belied the turmoil inside her. “You were one of my mother's lovers.”

He seemed to shrink inside his blue uniform. His face bore deep lines and crevices that seemed to multiply at her words.

“You're her daughter,” he said. “Lacey, is it?”

Her back was pressed against the door to the room, more for support than anything else. She was beginning to feel dizzy. “Was it actually my mother you meant to kill when you broke into the shelter?” she asked. “Was that who you were really after?”

He licked his lips, looking away from her for a moment, and she could see that he was trying to decide how to proceed. Finally, he motioned toward the interior office. “Come inside and we can talk,” he said.

“I'll sit right here.” She lowered herself to the chair closest to the door. The vinyl made a sound like air being let out of a tire as she sat down on it.

He took a seat on the other side of the small room, and Lacey studied him. She would not have recognized him in a lineup. His dark hair had turned completely white during the past twelve years, and he
was
smaller, or maybe it was just the fact that he was not wearing a heavy coat or carrying a gun that made him seem diminished in size.

“I hadn't expected…” He looked down at his hands as though he was not certain what to say. “They told me you were coming.” He smiled at her and she had to look away. The smile was too unexpectedly warm, and she did not want to be seduced by it. “I figured we'd have a little talk and I would tell you how sorry I was that your mother tried to protect my wife. But I realize now that the truth must be written all over my face.”

She couldn't breathe. The light-headedness made her want to lean over and hang her head between her knees. Did she want to sit here and have him tell her things that were guaranteed to distress her even further, or should she simply tell him she'd made a mistake in coming and run from the room?

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I don't want to say anything bad about your mother.”

“Tell me,” she said. She had come this far. If she didn't have this conversation with him now, not knowing what he had to say would always haunt her. “I already know she was…unfaithful to my father.”

He stared at her, licking his lips again. “I met her in the little shop I used to work in,” he said. “A little sundries store in Kill Devil Hills, over by…well, it doesn't matter. I'm not even sure if it's still there. She came in one time to buy a pair of sandals she saw in our window, and we started talking. She started coming in then, almost every day, just to talk, and to make a long story short, I fell in love with her. I had a bipo
lar disorder, although I didn't know that at the time. I just knew that I'd go on these jags of having loads of energy and feeling like the world was a pretty terrific place to be, and then, without warning, I'd plummet. Drop lower than low. But I could always manage to hide what was going on inside of me—to stay in control of it—as long as my life was on an even keel.” He looked down at his hands. They were folded in his lap, and he was rubbing one of the thumbs over the other. “I was in a manic phase when I met your mother,” he said. “A long one. And at first it was great.”

“Did she take you to the keeper's house?”

He looked surprised. “You know about that?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Yes, that's where we'd meet.” He looked apologetic. “I don't like talking to you about this.”

“Go on.” She was picturing her father at the animal hospital, working hard as he always did, making money to support his family, while his wife was taking men to the keeper's house without a thought to how she was hurting her family.

“I didn't feel right about what I was doing,” he said, “but I was so driven. It's hard to explain the effect she had on me.”

“She had it on a lot of men,” she said, wanting to take some of the wind out of his sails.

“Yes, I know that,” he said. “Not at the time, though. I thought we were so much in love that it somehow legitimized the infidelity. I convinced myself that it was all right.” He studied his hands again, the movement of his thumbs the only clue that he was nervous. “But as I said, I didn't do well under stress and my mood started to go south. I wasn't much fun for her anymore, I guess, and she wanted to end the affair. I couldn't bear the thought of being without her, and I was so…so ill at the time, that I threatened to kill both her and myself if she left me. If I couldn't have her, I didn't want
anyone else to have her, either. I was selfish and crazy and self-absorbed,” he said. “I think what happened was that Annie—your mother—became afraid that I might hurt my wife and son, so she made up some cock-and-bull story about getting a call from one of my friends or a neighbor or someone and got them into the battered women's shelter where she worked. Of course, I knew where the place was because she'd told me all about it back when things were good between us. When I went there, Lacey, I was out of my mind. I intended to kill all three of them and then myself, but you're right, that first bullet was meant for your mother.”

“And she knew it,” Lacey said. “She had to know that if she stepped in front of your wife, you were going to kill her.”

He drew in a long breath. “I believe—and will believe to my dying day—that she thought that if I shot her first, I would never get around to killing my wife and son. That they'd be able to escape before I could get to them. Everybody said she was trying to save their lives by stepping in front of Faye—my wife—and they were right. They just didn't know what Annie knew—that I was there to kill her as well as them, one way or another. Once I shot her, it was like something snapped in me and I realized what an insane thing I was doing. That's why I didn't hurt anyone else.” He lifted his head to look at her and there were tears in his eyes. “Oh, Lacey,” he said. “I'm so sorry. The truth is, I've grown in here. I'm not just a healthier person, I'm a better person, and this place…” He waved his hand through the air. “The doctors and the chaplain…I don't know what would have become of me if I hadn't landed in here. But I would give anything…
anything
if I could bring your mother back and erase everything that happened between us and return her whole and unharmed to you and your family.”

She did not want to believe him or to trust his sincerity.
He was, after all, Rick's father. But there was something in his eyes that convinced her he was telling the truth, that he was done with lies.

“It took a long time,” he said, “with a lot of shrinks trying me on a lot of different medications, but finally, they hit the right one. That was when I truly realized what I'd done. That I'd taken a life. That I'd ruined many other lives. I wanted to die. I tried to kill myself, but they make that hard to do in prison.” He offered her a rueful smile. “It was the Reverend McConnell who got me through it all. You probably don't need to hear that,” he said. “That I got through it. Your mother's story ended, and mine continued. I know how unfair that must seem to you.”

“What will you do if you get out on parole?” she asked.

“I want to enter the seminary,” he said, then smiled his apology again. “Does that sound like a line to you?”

She looked away. It would have sounded like a line if she hadn't heard about it from his son first. “I'm not sure,” she said.

“I'd like to be a prison chaplain,” he said. “And if I don't get out, it truly doesn't matter, because I've been able to work here. Maybe I have even more credibility on the inside than I would on the outside. There are a lot of people in here in need of spiritual guidance. My son wants me out so badly. He thinks I can only do what I want to do if I'm released. He doesn't get it.”

“Get what?”

“That I'm every bit as free in here as I would be out there,” he said. “I'll have peace in my heart no matter where I am.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “And what about you, Lacey?” he asked. “How is your heart these days?”

Lacey couldn't hold it together any longer. Lowering her head, she started to cry.

Victim's Impact Statement
by Lacey O'Neill

P
eople called my mother Saint Anne. She was probably better loved and better known in the area than anyone else. She loved animals and children and nature. She was generous in the extreme to her friends and neighbors, treasured everyone she met, and she tried to help make the world a better place in an enormous variety of ways, most of which you have probably heard about in the other statements you've received.

What you haven't heard about is that my mother knew how to forgive. I don't think she held a grudge against a soul. If I put someone down, she would come to their defense. She had the gentlest way of confronting people who had done something wrong. Once I saw her stop a teenaged boy on the street after hearing him utter a racial slur. She didn't yell at him, but instead gave him a little, soft-spoken lecture on the way that fear and ignorance can make us hate other people. When she saw a mother yell at her young child one time, she talked to the mother about how hard it could be to have
demanding little children, and she gave the woman her phone number to call her the next time she lost her temper at her son. Another time, I saw her confront a boy who dropped a candy-bar wrapper on the sidewalk. Instead of giving him a piece of her mind, she told him about the elderly man who owned the store on that part of the sidewalk, and how he came out of the store every evening to sweep the sidewalk clean.

I'm not writing this to tell you more stories about my mother being a saint, because she wasn't one. She was just a human being who did her best to understand why other people made mistakes, and she forgave them.

If I could talk to my mother right now and ask her how she felt about Zachary Pointer getting out on parole, I know what she would say. She would tell me he was human, that he had been hurting when he killed her. She'd say that he had paid for his crime, and that he had redeemed himself. She would tell me that, as long as he is no longer dangerous to anyone, he should be set free to become a productive member of society.

So, I am writing to suggest that Mr. Pointer be released from prison on parole. Please give him the chance to continue the good deeds that my mother is no longer capable of doing.

A
t ten o'clock on Christmas Eve, Lacey and Bobby, Clay and Gina and Mackenzie stood in the kitchen of the keeper's house and bade farewell to their guests. It had been a wonderful, even an amazing evening. There had been fifteen of them for the buffet dinner, all of them in one way or another family, from Nola Dillard to Tom Nestor to Paul Macelli, who was Olivia's first husband and Jack's father, down visiting from Washington, DC. Nothing could have pleased Lacey more than to have that diverse group of people together and see everyone get along. Rani provided the bulk of the entertainment, simply by being a two-and-a-half-year-old adorable peanut of a child, and Jack, Maggie and Mackenzie had been coerced into singing carols with everyone else before scooting upstairs to hang out on Mackenzie's computer.

The only person missing from the holiday celebration was Bobby's cousin, Elise. Around Halloween Elise had disappeared. The friends she'd been staying with told Bobby that she simply didn't come home one night. Bobby feared
that her contacts in Richmond had found her and dragged her back up there—or worse—but Lacey thought that Elise might have returned to her old life of her own volition. Either way, if Elise's disappearance was a mystery that could be solved, she planned to help Bobby solve it.

This was the first year that Lacey had agreed to have a real tree for Christmas. After her mother's death in the battered women's shelter, where the scent of pine had filled the rooms, she'd been unable even to pass a Christmas tree lot without feeling sick to her stomach. But Mackenzie had pleaded for a real tree. She and her mother had never had one in Arizona, she'd said, and Lacey felt ready to give it a try. Once the tree was up and the scent was strong in the living room of the keeper's house, she discovered that she actually liked the smell. It was so fresh and welcoming. She would miss it when it was time to take the tree down.

In the opposite corner of the living room stood an enormous poinsettia, a gift from Rick that had arrived the week before Christmas. He was always sending flowers, using any occasion he could as an excuse for the gifts. Lacey had written to him, extending her forgiveness, and he'd written back to thank her, but still the plants and flowers came. Maybe they would come for the rest of her life.

In two weeks, she would be leaving the keeper's house forever. In the late spring, it would open as a museum. She would be one of the docents, but it would not be the same. The history
she
knew of the house was not the history the tourists would be paying money to hear. She could not tell them how her parents had met on the beach by the lighthouse. She couldn't tell them how the old lighthouse keeper, Mary Poor, had allowed her mother to use the keeper's house for her illicit trysts, or how her mother's ashes had been tossed into the ocean from the nearby pier after her murder. She
couldn't tell them how the lighthouse had become her father's obsession, how he probably had thousands of pictures of it still stored in boxes somewhere in his house. And she could not tell them how she had lived in the house for two years herself, turning it into her safe haven as she tried to put the pieces of her life back together.

With all the guests gone, the residents of the house began cleaning up, stuffing used wrapping paper into garbage bags and picking up plates and glasses from all over the house and bringing them into the kitchen.

“Will we
finally
have a dishwasher in the new house?” Mackenzie asked, as she dried plate after plate that Lacey was washing.

“Yes, we will,” Lacey said.

“And Clay and I will have one, too,” Gina said. “How about you, Bobby?”

“No dishwasher for me,” he said. “Except when Mackenzie comes over.”

It took Mackenzie a second to get it, but then she groaned. “You're so full of dad humor tonight,” she said.

Lacey smiled at Bobby across the top of Mackenzie's head. There are and always will be secrets in this family, she thought. Perhaps there were even secrets she was not privy to, but there were definitely two that she knew about. No one other than Clay, Bobby, Gina and herself knew that Clay was Mackenzie's father. The DNA test had proven it unequivocally, and as elated as Clay had been by that news, Bobby had been equally saddened. Mackenzie was as close to one man as she was the other, though, and Lacey planned to do her best to keep things that way. One day they would tell Mackenzie the truth, and by that time, Lacey prayed the girl would be so attached to both her fathers that the fact of her conception would not erase the endearment she felt to either of them.

One final secret would remain forever between two people only: Zachary Pointer and herself. There was nothing to be gained by revealing his relationship to her mother. Nothing but hurt, all the way around.

Zachary had called her around nine o'clock that evening, when the gifts had all been opened and everyone was full and content. She took the call in the sunroom, away from the chaos of the living room.

“I wanted to thank you for the kaleidoscope,” he said. “It's amazing.”

“You're welcome.” It was good to hear his voice. He sounded strong.

“I've been thinking about you and praying for you all day,” he said. “I know Christmas Eve must be hard for you.” They both knew he was thinking of the long-ago Christmas Eve that had so irrevocably altered both their lives.

“Your prayers worked,” she said. “This is the best Christmas Eve I've had in a long time.”

“Have you and Mackenzie found a place to live yet?” he asked.

“We found a perfect little house to rent,” she said. “And she'll be able to stay in the same school, which is the most important thing.”

“Wonderful. And Bobby?”

“He'll be right next door to us.” She laughed. “Literally.”

Their houses were identical. Tiny, a little too old, but affordable, the only difference being that the house Lacey would be renting did, indeed, have a dishwasher, while Bobby's did not. “And Clay and Gina are in the process of buying a house in Pine Island,” she added.

“Excellent,” he said.

“And how about you, Zachary?” she asked. “When do you start at the seminary?”

“January fifth,” he said. “It will be a wonderful beginning to a new year. To a new life. Thank you, Lacey.”

“You're very welcome.”

There was a brief moment of silence on the line.

“Are you ready to leave Kiss River?” he asked.

“It's going to be hard,” she admitted. “It's been my refuge while I learned how to avoid following in my mother's footsteps.”

“You're still angry at her,” he said.

“Not really,” she said, but she knew it was a lie, and so did he.

“If you could forgive me, you can surely forgive your mother, Lacey,” Zachary said.

“You were mentally ill,” Lacey was quick to answer.

“So was she, honey,” he said. “So was she.”

The conversation in the kitchen swirled around her, now, as the dishes were washed and dried and put away, but Lacey barely heard it. With the revelers gone and the five of them packed into the warm room, she suddenly felt the loss of the house to her bones. She took a step away from the sink, although it was still full of dishes with more waiting to be washed, and dried her hands on a paper towel.

“I want to go out to the lighthouse,” she said.

“What?”
Clay sounded incredulous. “You'll freeze your butt off up there.”

“I'll get my jacket,” Bobby said, but she rested her hand on his arm.

“I want to go alone, okay?” she asked.

He understood. “Of course,” he said.

She walked to the hall closet and retrieved her down jacket and her gloves, then pulled her thigh-high waders on over her slacks. It had grown quiet in the kitchen, the only
sound the rattling of dishes in the sink where Bobby had taken over her job.

“I won't be long,” she said, walking back through the kitchen toward the door. She was stepping onto the porch when she heard Mackenzie ask in a near whisper, “What's the matter with Lacey?” and Bobby's answer, “Sometimes people just need time alone.”

Clay had been right; it was very cold outside. She pulled her knit hat from the pocket of her jacket and put it on, tugging it low over her ears. She pressed her body into the wind as she walked in the direction of the ocean. In a few weeks a fence would be built around the lighthouse, one that would allow the water to pass through it but would keep the tourists out. She had plotted a way to get up in the lighthouse after the fence was built, but then she learned that a padlocked door would block the entrance and she'd been foiled. It was time to give up her attachment to the tower.

The ocean was ferocious, the water nearly reaching the top of her waders as she walked through it to get to the steps. Inside, the octagonal room was cold, the sound of the sea muted by the thick brick walls, and she began to climb. When she rose out of the tower onto the exposed steps at the top, the wind nearly knocked her over, and she held tight to the railing as she turned around to sit down.

God, it was dark! The wind carried with it tiny, sharp ice crystals, which bit into her cheeks. Yet the sky was filled with stars. Sometimes she had to remind herself that the stars existed in the winter as well as the summer. It was easy to forget when all the time you spent outside was rushing from the car to the house.

She tilted her head back to look at the dome of stars above her, and suddenly felt, more deeply than she ever had before, her mother's presence. The feeling was so strong it
frightened her, and she thought of descending the stairs and returning to the warm house. But something kept her there, clutching the railing with her gloved hands, her face lifted up to the sky.

“I have to leave here soon, Mom,” she said out loud, but she couldn't even hear her own words, the wind stole them from her so quickly. It was not so quick to steal her tears, though. She felt afraid, as though leaving Kiss River meant that she would also be leaving her mother behind. That's what she'd been trying to do all year, yet now she realized how impossible a task that was. “I want you with me forever,” she said to the sky. “Just, please—” she began to smile “—leave the crazy parts of you behind, okay?”

She wiped the back of her gloved hand across her wet face and stood up. Taking one step down, she stopped and looked up at the sky again.

“Bye, Mom,” she said, watching the tiny diamond lights flicker high above her. “I love you.”