Not a Sparrow Falls (34 page)

Her talks with Alasdair continued over pots of tea and cakes and puddings and cookies. Sometimes they would just sit there in silence, the sticky plates between them, the sweetness lingering. She knew him. And he knew her. Not facts, perhaps, but you could know a person’s heart without knowing their history. Couldn’t you?

Something troubled her greatly, though. Bridie cleared up the last of the supper dishes now and realized what it was. It was as if she were two distinct people. One who played with the children, had helped them make Santas from cotton balls and tempera paint, reindeer from corks and pipe cleaners. She was the one who bought their big-boy and big-girl beds and taught them to stay in them after she turned off all but the night-lights. That woman lay awake at night, searching for her own way back from the other person she’d become in that life she didn’t like to think about. So far she had not found it.

And the continued deception of Alasdair was an ache on her conscience. Her only comfort was that they were very nearly done with Anna’s journals. They should have been finished by now, but they didn’t read every night anymore. It
was as if neither of them was anxious to probe this part of Anna’s life, only continuing on because they’d already begun.

They were different, these scrapbooks. From Samantha’s birth onward, Anna seemed to spend most of her energy documenting her daughter’s life rather than her own. There were some personal entries, of course. Accounts of a couple of violent quarrels over what she saw as Alasdair’s overinvolvement in ministry to the neglect of his family. Followed by a sense of resignation. Resignation to everything—to the unromantic partnership her marriage had become, to the unhappy relationship she had with her in-laws, to the way she couldn’t seem to make anything happen in her own life. Without Alasdair encouraging her, without the hope that had sprung from her fantasies of his perfect love, she seemed to have settled into a flattened-out, dimly lit life, brightened only by her daughter.

Bridie watched Samantha’s reaction carefully as they covered these years, but it was hard to tell what she was thinking. Listening to the story of her mother’s life didn’t inspire the smart-alecky “TMI” anymore, but she didn’t seem like the falling, desperate sparrow, either. She seemed to be coming to a realization of her own. Her parents were human. Real people with feelings, conflicts, attractions, and failures that had nothing to do with her.

Samantha had perked up considerably when Bridie suggested they explore the seven backpacks. They’d pored over every piece of paper Samantha had generated in her grade-school years.

And they’d almost gotten caught.

“What do you girls do in there?” Alasdair had asked one night, gesturing toward Samantha’s bedroom as she came out.

Bridie had frozen. There was no way she could lie to him. Not now. Not anymore. “We tell secrets,” she had said. Not understanding, he had smiled.

Well, she consoled herself. Soon there would be no more need to lie. Anna’s journals would have served their purpose.
She would pack them back into the attic. There was only one left.

Twenty-Nine

Sondra sat in the Nelson County Commonwealth attorneys’ conference room and waited for him to arrive. They would settle the matter of Jonah Porter’s fate today, and she had little doubt how things would turn out. The Court of Appeals had found in her client’s favor and overturned his conviction. She was also fairly certain that Thomas Dinwiddie would decline to pursue a second trial. Why, then, this feeling of dread? She thought of her client—his chilling silences, his flat, empty eyes—and her question answered itself.

Jonah Porter was convicted on improperly obtained evidence, she reminded herself.

He’s guilty,
she answered back,
and you know it.

She opened the cover of the case file and pulled out the brief she’d submitted to the Court of Appeals. She read it again, hoping that this time she would feel better about the outcome. She scanned the facts. Officer Hinkley of the Charlottesville Police Department had been called to investigate the abandoned truck at 5:09 p.m. He arrived at the Piggly Wiggly parking lot at 5:22 p.m. The Hazardous Materials team was dispatched at 5:35 p.m., after which Officer Hinkley called in, suggesting there was probable cause for a warrant to be issued to search Mr. Porter’s residence. However, at that time he was told that the Nelson County Sheriff’s Department had already been dispatched to the residence based on information given in an anonymous tip. She flipped to the Charlottesville police’s transcript of the 9–1-1 call, hoping she’d overlooked something. There was no mistake. There, highlighted in yellow, was the entry:
At 4:09
p.m.
an unidentified female gave information concerning possible methamphetamine lab location. Referred to Nelson County sheriff.

She turned to the last page, the nail in the coffin, so to speak. Another dispatch log, this time from the Nelson
County sheriff. Officers were sent to the location of the possible methamphetamine lab at 4:45 p.m.

Sondra set down the file. There was no getting around it. The search was illegitimate. Anonymous tips required corroboration, and theirs—the drug paraphernalia found in the truck—had come after the fact. Twenty-four minutes too late.

She turned to the last page, the judgment the Virginia Court of Appeals had handed down. They’d granted Jonah Porter a new trial, remanded the matter back to the Nelson County Circuit Court. She should feel triumphant. Why so much anguish over a victory? she wondered again.

She heard footsteps, and Thomas Dinwiddie sailed into the room, derailing her thoughts. It was just as well. She greeted him. They shook hands, and he set his briefcase on the table and popped it open. He glanced at the judgment she’d been reading, and she felt slightly embarrassed, as if she’d been caught gloating. He didn’t seem offended, though. In fact, he gave her an ironic smile.

“Democracy in action. Gives you a warm, happy feeling, doesn’t it?”

She glanced at him sharply. His face was benign, apparently used to the yawning gap between justice and verdict. She shrugged, too ambivalent about what she’d done to defend it. “That’s the system,” she said. “Everyone deserves representation.”

“Yeah. God bless America.”

Sondra was thinking what to say next. He spared her the trouble, looked quickly through the folder in his hand, then turned clear blue eyes back to hers. “I don’t see the point of going to trial again on the original charges. I’ll deal down to possession instead of distribution. With credit for time served he can be back in Butcher Holler as soon as he pleads.”

“I’m surprised you’re caving in so completely,” she protested, aware she was arguing against her own client.

The prosecutor shrugged. “You won this round.”

Sondra nodded, shook hands again, and left. She had little
doubt Jonah Porter would take the plea. And be out in a matter of days. She walked to her car and felt very weary, in her spirit as well as her body. She had only one desire—to be done with this matter, never to have to lay eyes on Jonah Porter again. Or anyone like him, she realized.

Thirty

Jonah watched the bare-limbed Virginia winter flash by the window of the Department of Corrections bus as it jounced and bumped its way from the prison to the Nelson County jail. The woods were stark, the underbrush tangled and matted with dead leaves. He could see someone’s deer stand. They passed an apple orchard that would be covered in blossoms before long.

He thought about his great-uncle Joshua. He had roamed and ranged over every blessed inch of Nelson County and could tell you where every beaver dam, turtle egg, and rabbit hole was. He had known everything there was to know about planting and growing and harvesting. He had kept bees and made honey—sweet and clear and pure. He had even raised peafowl for a while. Jonah closed his eyes, and there were his uncle’s hands, thick and callused. He wondered what his uncle would say if he could see him now. He opened his eyes and and gazed out the window again, not really wanting an answer to that question.

The ride was over too soon. He stood, ducking his six-foot-four frame to meet the ceiling of the van, hobbling along as fast as his leg shackles would allow. He followed the guard into the jail and made his mind a blank while they processed him and took him to his cell. Only when he was alone inside it did he come back into focus, and even then he wished he sould stay in that other place. He felt like something was drumming and working itself up inside him. He tried to ignore it. He looked around him.

Prison and jail cells were all the same. Didn’t make any difference if you were in North Carolina or Virginia. Those were the only two states whose hospitality he’d sampled, but he imagined a jail cell in Seattle, Washington, would
look about the same as this one: concrete floor, stainless steel toilet, cot, no pillow.

It had started raining outside. A storm had come up while they were doing their paperwork. He couldn’t hear it through the double-paned, reinforced windows, but if he positioned his face just right and stood on tiptoe, he could see it through the thin slits of Plexiglas. He used to like the rain, but now it only made him nervous. Itchy and uncomfortable in his skin.

He stopped watching and began to pace around the cell. The first day he and Mary Bridget had run off, it had been raining. Hard, gully-washing rain. He had driven through the white sheets that pounded the windshield of his old truck, and she’d slept, her head in the crook between his shoulder and neck. His arm had gone to sleep, but he’d never even thought about waking her up.

He stopped pacing abruptly and lay down on the cot, stared at the same sort of white pockmarked insulated ceiling he’d seen a hundred thousand times. He felt a surge of anger. Now that freedom was in sight, it couldn’t come soon enough. He couldn’t wait any longer. A day was too long. An hour was too long. He needed things right now.

Here in the county jail he couldn’t get anything. None of the little tidbits the old fellows smuggled out of the infirmary. Nothing at all to take the edge off.

He clenched his jaw and told himself to take ahold. There wasn’t any other way. To get out he had to plead guilty in court tomorrow, and to do that he had to be transferred here. He would just have to stand it until he could get out and get what he needed. He made himself think about something else. He went over the things he was going to do when he got out, who he would call on, and in what order. How he would track her down. He lay there and stared at the ceiling of his cell until lights out, counting the ceiling tiles and the hours till his release.

****

Sondra turned toward the door of the holding area. Here came her client, looking like a hardscrabble farmer in the Salvation Army suit and shirt she’d bought with her own money. He hadn’t thanked her. Not that she’d expected him to. She wondered again why she bothered with him and all the others like him. It was a rhetorical question. The answer had everything to do with who she was and nothing to do with them. The guard led him to the counsel table, and Jonah Porter sat down beside her, silent and stoic. His dark hair was too long but combed back neatly. His high forehead bespoke intelligence, and she had to admit he was bright. One conversation with him had revealed that. There might be a few fried spots from his steady diet of meth, but so far she hadn’t seen them. Still, something about him gave her the creeps. His eyes were dark empty caverns. You could peer inside, and instead of seeing his soul, there were only miles and miles of nothing. He was completely without natural affections, as far as she could see. Without emotion of any kind. His affect was paper flat, as if everything had stopped mattering to him a long time ago. As if he would—literally—just as soon kill you as look at you. She suppressed a chill. And this was the man whose release she’d obtained.

The judge entered. They rose. She wondered if it was too late to rescind their plea agreement. Even bringing up the matter would be outrageously unethical, she reproved herself. The judge called the court to order before she could pursue her thoughts any further. Mr. Porter stood when his name was called, pleaded guilty to the charges they’d agreed on. She said her bit, Dinwiddie said his, and then it was over.

Porter gave her another look from those eyes and walked away without a word to her. She watched his receding back and resisted the urge to cross herself.

Dinwiddie tapped on her table, a cheery little salute.

“I’ll get him next time,” he said, reading her mind, or perhaps just her guilt-twisted face. “And trust me, there will be a next time.” He smiled. No hard feelings.

“I know.” She felt the weariness again, and along with it a sense of shame.

Thomas Dinwiddie gave her a snappy nod, then sauntered off, whistling softly.

“Wait,” she called after him, feeling as if he were the last lifeboat pushing off from the sinking
Titanic.

He turned, eyebrow raised. She shoved the handful of papers into her briefcase, snapped it shut, and then trotted to catch up to him.

“I was just wondering . . .”

He waited, politely expectant.

“Are there any openings in your office?”

****

Jonah walked from the jail into downtown Lovingston. He could try to thumb a ride out to Woodbine, but nobody would pick him up. He probably had prison written all over him. Besides, there wasn’t any point in it. There was nobody for him there, nothing he cared about, and going home wasn’t on his list of things to do. He walked along the highway, turning back toward the mountains every so often. There they were, the misty blue hills, their tops covered with a low-hanging bank of clouds today. He walked, then turned and looked, then walked some more.

He passed the school, the Baptist church, the grocery store, the furniture store, the farm supply, then cut across the parking lot of that old gas station Ted Willis sold heating oil out of and went behind the building to the back entrance of the bowling alley. Just like he’d thought. The same bunch was there. More or less. There were a few new faces, and some of the old ones gone, probably enjoying a little of the state’s hospitality, same as he’d been. But he recognized a few, one by name, and he jerked his head in greeting.