Not in the Heart (13 page)

She was something else. The light in her eyes. The life in her voice. What had been caustic and full of acid toward me had turned sugary sweet with hope and possibility.

“Yeah,” I said a little too hesitantly. “You could look stuff up on the Internet.”

“No, I want to do the next interview with you. Or track down some witness who saw the whole thing. And I'll drive you around in my car.”

“Abby, you're romanticizing this. Writing is a solitary, lonely experience. It's not a tag-team event.”

“You don't have to put my name on it. Maybe just a little acknowledgment or part of the dedication.”

“Maybe the next project. This one has a lot riding on it.”

“All the more reason for me to be involved. Start living, Dad. I can help you.”

The tide was turning in her voice, moving from the confident, sure intern who knew she could do the job to a bit of manipulative whining.

“Let me think about it.”

She took off her glasses. “No, let
me
think about it. I'll call Mom right now and tell her you blew all the money. Better yet, I'll call Oleta and tell
her
.”

I held up my hands. “Okay. You're hired.”

“Seriously?” She looked more excited than the day I pulled her first car into the driveway, the old Honda she was still driving. “You mean it?”

“You drive a hard bargain, Abigail.”

“Okay, so what's my first assignment?”

“Hand me your purse.”

She handed it over and I took out her credit card and put it on the check. “You pay for dinner. That's first. Then we get Mom's car to the hospital, you take me home, we wake up in the morning and figure it out.”

She held out her tiny hand and we shook. Father and daughter. Just like that.

What had I gotten myself into?

C
HAPTER
19

24 DAYS BEFORE EXECUTION

Abigail Wiley spoke briefly with her mother at the hospital about her “internship” with her father.

“I'm sure you'll learn a lot,” her mother said. She seemed excited but a little surprised. “You'll certainly get to spend more time together.”

“You think that will be good?” Abigail said.

“I'm sure if he said yes, he'll put you to work. You two will make a good team.”

Always positive, always the encourager. Abigail sensed that her mother might be a little jealous, but she wasn't going to let that stop her. She was her own person now and if this brought her and her father together, however briefly, it was worth it. Plus, she really did want to know how to do what he did. It was one thing to study journalism in a classroom and entirely another to do it in the real world.

For one, broadcast journalists weren't supposed to be able to write. Her father mentioned someone named Charles Kuralt, whom he'd watched in class, long ago, marveling at the way the short man with chubby hands could string sentences together like a roving Shakespeare. The fluid rush of words came with bad teeth and a double chin that jiggled as he delivered his weekly sonnets.

“Kuralt taught me it didn't matter what people said, didn't matter how you looked. What mattered was the substance of the story,” he said.

The knock on broadcast journalism majors, he continued, was that they were all pretty people with perfect teeth and hair and not much upstairs except the ambition for fifteen minutes of fame. They could write a stand-up for the end of a report and fill in the blanks between sound bites, but as for actual writing, they weren't
real
journalists like those in print.

“Professors taught students it was more difficult to boil a story down than get every bit of information, but those at the
Cavalier Daily
didn't buy it.”

Abigail was enamored with these slices of life from his past, which quickly turned to questions about his first as-told-to book. She learned the publisher was also skeptical of his abilities. When it sold half a million copies, their skepticism turned to faith and he produced a string of memoirs, some more successful than others, but none that did as well as the first.

“I gained confidence with each project,” he said. “I shoehorned them in between assignments and wrote on the road. The most important thing in the publishing game is to be able to hit a deadline. If you can do that, you'll be in the top 10 percent of the writers out there. Due dates never bothered me; they pushed me to become better.”

“What's the hardest part of the writing?” she said.

“Getting up the courage to begin. To set the first words on the page and let them rest. There's always a fear I'll go in a wrong direction, veering into forbidden territory and getting lost. I usually wake up one morning and decide that's the day to begin.”

He pulled two tables from the craft room to set up shop in the living room. Abigail couldn't tell if it was too painful for him to use Aiden's room. There were pictures and cards on his bed, and helium-filled balloons hovered above the air-conditioning vent. Perhaps it signaled all the things he had missed, or he could have just disliked the view.

Her mother returned from the hospital that afternoon, took one look at his L-shaped work area next to the couch, and disappeared. After conferring with Abigail, they put their heads together and fashioned the craft room into a journalistic oasis with a door he could close.

The sky-blue ceiling and walls were cheery without being too positive. It gave the feeling that one could float away from one's troubles, and Abigail thought that might be the best thing for her father to do, given he was writing such a depressing story.

“Did you want to write when you were in school?” Abigail asked her mother, aligning one of the craft tables under the window.

“I had career ambitions, but those mostly flew away when you two came along. Something about children causes you to shuffle your priorities.”

“Must feel like giving up.”

She winced. “Thanks a lot.”

“No, I didn't mean it that way. I meant that Dad goes to all these exotic places and gets awards and you have to stay home.”

“I know it seems unfair. I don't claim it was easy, but I felt I had the more important job. Raising you and Aiden had perks I could never get reporting on some city council meeting or even a White House briefing.”

Abigail placed memory books on a shelf in the closet and closed the door. “Really? Like what?”

“Watching your first steps. Hearing your first words. How do you get that back? The only way to experience it is to be there when it happens.” She stopped, placed a fake flower arrangement on the windowsill, and said, “Tell him to come in here.”

When her father saw it, the look on his face said it all. He spent most of his life distant and consumed with himself, but she had to admit that for a moment he seemed to get past it. “This is perfect.”

“I can sleep in Aiden's room and you can have my room,” her mother said.

“No, I took care of that already. I picked this up at Walmart.” He pulled out an air mattress and put it on the floor in the corner. “I'll sleep here, whether I need it or not.”

Abigail retrieved a set of twin sheets from the laundry room and made his bed. It felt good to do something domestic, just to see what it felt like. She had done this for Philip, though the two hadn't gotten as far as moving in together. Just cleaning up at his apartment, providing a feminine touch here and there. But her father didn't notice her efforts; he was already focused on the story. She hadn't told her mother about his losses and probably wouldn't. Unless he did something that really ticked her off.

She could handle this getting-to-know-him thing. It felt strange but good.

C
HAPTER
20

After she and Ellen set up the writing room, I filled Abby in on what I knew about the murder, hitting the high points. I didn't want to get bogged down in the mud of a lot of questions.

When I'm in the writing zone, I find sleep distressing. Closing my eyes feels like a waste. The ticking clock is not my friend, especially when the subject of the book can't be reached by e-mail after his execution. That pressure propelled me forward like no other project had, plus the added pressure of knowing I needed to get Terrelle's voice right. A guy who would give his heart to my son at least deserved that. I took time out to eat, but I consciously kept my e-mail closed and tried not to open Internet Explorer to the several gambling sites I frequented.

I missed Murrow. Like Hemingway, I suppose, I enjoy the company of cats who couldn't care less if I'm writing a bestseller or a family newsletter. I like creatures who are absorbed with themselves, probably because I am one of their own. They exude an infectious peace and contentment. Oleta informed me that Murrow was firmly ensconced in her daughter's old room, and even though Terrelle would have fed her to the gators if he had been home, Oleta did enjoy the sign of life in the house.

Abby was full of questions. I tried to reward her inquisitions with real-life lessons, but I made it clear that I couldn't spend time explaining the process, that it would simply slow me down.

“You have to look at this like a spectator at a NASCAR race,” I said. (One of my best books was with a driver who told me his story while playing his Xbox. He was killed in an accident at Talladega and book sales increased for a few months.) “I can't spend time talking about how I do this. I have to do it. If you want to help, you'll watch and learn and find ways to fill in the gaps.”

“Great,” she said, holding up a picture. “I want to fill in the gaps by nailing this guy.”

“Who's that?”

“Curtis Tompkins. Diana's boss. You told me about him.”

“Abby . . .”

“One of the first things I learned in J-school was to follow the story. Answer any questions that come up. And this guy is one big question mark.”

“So you think Terrelle is innocent?” I said.

“From what you say, he thinks he is. And so does Oleta. What's the harm in doing a little more research?”

“You're right about following the story. But there will always be questions. And everything you discover won't work itself into the book. We only have a limited amount of time and I need you for more important things.”

“Like coffee and sandwiches? Come on, Dad. We should at least ask him a few questions.”

“Tompkins may just be a question that will always be there. What I need is to get to the dump where Conley was living, where Diana's body was found.”

“Fine. You keep writing and I'll take pictures at the dump. And then set up an interview with Tompkins.”

“No, you stay away from him. But find out what you can online. And the pictures at the dump would help.”

Her eyes lit like a kid going to Disney. She left with Aiden's digital camera in tow and came back that afternoon with a memory stick full of pictures I used the next morning to put down the first chapter. Choosing to use third person for that chapter to give the feel of objectivity, I began in a flurry.

Diana Wright's body was found in a shallow grave less than five yards from the trailer where Terrelle Conley slept. On the morning of April 29, Conley was awakened from a dead sleep by Detective George Chandler. He was led outside past abandoned cars and rusted equipment and shown the mound of dirt where a cadaver dog named Thunder had signaled the presence of a body. Thunder watched Conley being led to the mound, while inside the trailer Detective Dennis Sawyer located the murder weapon, a .38 wrapped in an oily rag and stashed in the cupboard above a dish-filled sink. The trailer was described as “a trash heap” littered with spent bottles of wine and the occasional whiskey flask.

These are the facts about the day Terrelle Conley's life changed forever. But there are other facts. His blood-alcohol level when he was booked later that morning was twice the legal limit, and that was after a night's sleep. There were clothing fibers, hair, and blood from Diana Wright's body found in Terrelle's aging Mazda that, by all accounts, coughed and sputtered more than he did—when it started at all. Every shred of evidence investigators discovered in and around the trailer pointed to Terrelle's guilt.

Nearly a year to the day later, a jury deliberated for a little less than three hours and brought back the expected verdict. Terrelle was sentenced to death a week later by Judge Henry Coursey.

His conviction was consistent with the facts of the case. Investigators said it was open and shut. The district attorney never had such an easy conviction. But the other consistent point about the Terrelle Conley case is that from the first interrogation through interviews conducted for the writing of this book, he never wavered in claiming his innocence. Not once in his long incarceration did he ever hint that he might be guilty. When offered a plea deal that would have spared his life from the death penalty, Conley's court-appointed attorney, Dawson Kenyon, a man who had an equal battle with strong drink, stood and shakily said, “The defendant pleads not guilty, Your Honor.”

Culling information from the court transcript, I tried to present an overview of the case to give a compelling look at the mountain of evidence Conley was up against, and that I was up against if I wanted the reader to come away with even a hint of question as to whether or not Terrelle Conley had actually killed Diana Wright. If I could at least provide some tension with this point, I figured this would drag the reader kicking and screaming to know the answer and would also propel them through the section I dreaded writing the most, the religious conversion. This part would be fawned over by the faithful who thrill to see God changing a depraved heart, but I hoped my mainstream readers would skip that section or at least be able to stomach it. I wanted a broader audience than the church-pew type who bought a book and passed it to ten others.

I knew I had something good going when Abby showed up at the end of the first full day of writing, pulling the pages off the printer and reading them like they were lost scrolls found in some Qumran cave. She was seeing the translation of life onto a page and her interest invigorated me, though I instructed her not to get the pages mixed up.

“How do you know his attorney had a problem with the bottle?”

“He had a couple of DUIs after the trial. I have to check it out more. Maybe that's something you could clear up for me.”

After once losing the first half of an entire manuscript to a computer crash, I vowed to never again let that happen and set in place a regimen every day that I followed as religiously as Ellen or Oleta followed their “quiet times.” Each day, and sometimes twice a day when an interview happened in the middle, I would save the file, save it in another destination on the hard drive, save it to my desktop, save it to a removable thumb drive, e-mail it to my Yahoo! account, and then print that day's work. If my computer crashed, I had a backup. If the house burned, I had the files waiting for me somewhere in cyberspace. Abby couldn't understand my anal tendencies until I told her about the crash and the work I had to redo.

“It was probably a better book the second time around,” she said. “That happened to Hemingway.”

She proceeded to tell me a story I already knew, about Hemingway's lost works that his wife Hadley had brought to him in France. She piled all of his manuscripts
plus
the carbon copies in a suitcase, which was stolen or lost, and he had to begin everything again. Hemingway credited that crisis as one of the best things that happened to his writing. But I'm not Hemingway, no matter what he thought about cats.

She took the next page and pulled at her lip as she read, a nervous habit or force of concentration. I remember coming home from a trip when she was a teenager, days after the latest Harry Potter book had been released, only to find she had finished it in two days. And those were big books. She pulled the next page from the printer tray and read. Then the next. And the next. She was hooked.

Halfway through the chapter she stopped. “So you do think there's a chance he's innocent.”

“You and I both know he's not, but I'm leaving that door open for the reader. I'm finding out just like they will. Stories are about tension. Conflict. I have to keep that going.”

“But, Dad, that's a lot of conflict for us. If you find out Conley is innocent, Aiden's chances are over.”

“It's not going to happen. There's no smoking gun here but the one found in Terrelle's trailer. I'm hoping he'll confess by the execution, but we may never get the whole truth. I need to tell what we do know as well as I can.”

“So you're manufacturing the tension, getting us to believe there's a possibility that he's innocent and then pulling the rug out?”

“No. I can't change what happened in Conley's life. I can't change whether he killed Diana or not. The only thing I can control is how well I tell the story and follow the truth. Whether I'm writing politics or sports, I've found the truth will always lead you to a good place.”

She pulled at her lip and picked up another page.

I wondered if I really believed what I had just said.