The Silver Star (19 page)

“I’m Bean Holladay. This is my sister, Liz. We need to talk to you. About a legal matter.”

He smiled. “Let me guess. Your mother grounded you, and you want me to appeal the ruling.”

“It’s serious,” I said.

He took out a key and unlocked the door. “I suspect it is.” He looked at Liz. “What happened to you?”

“That’s what we’re here to talk about,” I said.

Mr. Corbin’s office was a mess, with law books propped open and legal papers stacked everywhere. I took that as a good sign. Any lawyer who couldn’t afford a secretary to keep his
office neat must be honest.

Mr. Corbin had us sit in cracked leather chairs facing his desk while he shuffled some of the papers covering the surface. “Now, tell me what happened,” he said.

I cleared my throat. “It’s kind of complicated,” I said.

“It usually is,” he said.

“And awful,” Liz added. It was the first thing she’d said since we’d got to town.

“You probably can’t tell me anything I haven’t heard before,” he said. “And if a lawyer can’t keep his mouth shut about things his clients tell him, he
shouldn’t be a lawyer.”

“What do you charge?” I asked.

He smiled and shook his head. “Let’s not worry about that at this point. Let’s just hear what the problem is.”

“It involves Jerry Maddox,” I said.

Mr. Corbin raised his eyebrows. “Then I imagine it is complicated.”

After that, the whole story came spilling out. Mr. Corbin listened quietly, his clasped hands propping up his chin.

“Wayne told us he’ll testify,” I said.

“What a mess,” Mr. Corbin said, almost to himself. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “So, you didn’t go to the hospital or to the police?”

“I wanted to talk to a lawyer first.”

“Why isn’t your uncle here with you?”

“He wants us to forget the whole thing ever happened.”

“And you don’t want to forget it? You want to file charges?”

“What I want is for my uncle to blow Mr. Maddox’s brains out with his shotgun,” I said.

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“That isn’t going to happen, so we came to find out what we’re supposed to do, legal-wise.”

“It’s not really a question of what you’re supposed to do. It’s more a question of what you want to do.” Mr. Corbin picked up a paper clip and pried it apart. We
had two options, he went on. One, we could press charges, which would create a big stink and a nasty trial with a lot of god-awful publicity but might result in Mr. Maddox being punished for what
he allegedly did. On the other hand, there was no guarantee of that. Two, we could decide it was an incident that involved bad judgment on the part of both parties—since Liz did voluntarily
get into the back of the car with Mr. Maddox—and didn’t need to be rehashed in a public courtroom with the entire town following every sordid detail.

“What’s the right thing to do?” I asked.

“I can’t decide that for you,” he said. “You two have to decide that. And unfortunately, you don’t have a choice between a good option and a bad option. Each option
is bad in its own way.”

“We can’t just do nothing,” I said.

“Why not?” Mr. Corbin asked.

“Because what Maddox did was wrong,” I said, “and because then he’ll be walking around laughing about how he got away with it.” At that point, something occurred to
me. “And he might do it again.”

“Possibly.”

“We can’t let that happen.”

“Do you think he’d try it again?” Liz asked.

I had been doing most of the talking and was surprised to hear her speak up.

Mr. Corbin shrugged. “Like I said, it’s possible.”

“I just don’t want it to happen again,” Liz said. “I’m scared of him doing it again. I’m scared of even running into him.”

“You could always leave town,” Mr. Corbin said. “Can’t you go stay with your mother?”

“We tried that last summer,” I said. “It didn’t work out so well. Anyway, Maddox attacked my sister, and we’re supposed to go into hiding? That’s not
right.”

“No, it’s not. It’s an option, nonetheless.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Liz said. “My thoughts keep jumbling up. Bean, what do you think?”

“The thing is,” I said, “if we don’t at least file charges, it will be like nothing ever happened.”

“Legally speaking, that’s true,” Mr. Corbin said. “If you do file charges, you can always drop them later, but bear in mind that these things sometimes develop a momentum
of their own.”

“Well,” I said, “if we don’t want to pretend it never happened and we don’t want to leave town and go into hiding, we have no choice. We have to file
charges.”

Mr. Corbin put down his paper clip. “Bean Holladay, how old are you?”

“Twelve. I’ll be thirteen in April.”

“You’re a little young to be making a decision like this on your own. Should you decide to proceed, you need your uncle with you from here on in.”

“He’s going to be mad,” I said.

“I’ll call him.” Mr. Corbin picked up the phone and dialed. “Tinsley,” he said. “Bill Corbin here.” He explained that Liz and I were in his office and
that we’d decided to file charges against Jerry Maddox for the alleged assault the night before. He stopped and listened, then shook his head. “No, sir. It’s not my advice. They
came to me, and I outlined their options, and they made the decision.” He listened again. Then he handed the phone to me. “He wants to talk to you.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Uncle Tinsley asked.

“We’re going to file charges,” I said.

“I thought you were going to drop the whole matter.”

“He’ll think he can try it again. And what if he does? What are we supposed to do then? Just let him? Hide from him? We can’t. So we’re filing charges.”

There was a long pause.

“I’ll meet you at the sheriff’s office.”

Mr. Corbin called the sheriff’s department and told them we were coming over. When I asked him how much we owed him, Mr. Corbin said he considered it pro bono. That meant
free, Liz explained.

“So you’ll be our lawyer?” I asked. “Pro bono?”

“If you press charges, the state’s prosecutor becomes your lawyer,” Mr. Corbin said. “You won’t need me.”

“Oh,” I said.

The sheriff’s department was in a low brick building with a flat roof. The deputy at the desk didn’t seem particularly happy to see us. He called in another deputy. The other guy
wasn’t smiling, either. He had me wait in the lobby while he brought Liz into the back to take her statement.

A few minutes later, Uncle Tinsley came through the door wearing one of his tweed jackets and his gray felt hat. He sat down next to me in the row of orange plastic chairs. We didn’t say
anything. After a bit, he reached over and ruffled my hair.

Liz wasn’t in the back for long.

“How’d it go?” I asked when she came out.

“They took some pictures, asked questions, and I answered them, okay?” she said. “Let’s go home.”

By the time
we got back to Mayfield, the school day was half over. Uncle Tinsley said, given everything that had happened, we might
as well just stay home and unwind. A few hours later, we heard a car roar up the driveway. I went to the window and saw Maddox’s black Le Mans screech to a stop. Doris Maddox got out, more
pregnant than ever, and slammed the door behind her. Liz was up in the bird wing, but Uncle Tinsley and I went out to meet Doris, who was stalking over to the porch.

For a moment, I genuinely believed Doris had come to apologize and try to smooth things over. She was constantly complaining about what a no-count scoundrel her husband was—always
tomcatting around, had a terrible temper, picked fights right and left, lied through his teeth. I thought Doris was going to say something like “Look, what my husband did was wrong, but he
does provide for me and my kids, and if you go ahead with this, it will hurt my family.”

But as soon as I saw Doris’s face, I realized she had not come to make amends. Her mouth was tight and her eyes were all fired up.

“What the goddamn hell do you think you’re doing?” she shouted. “How dare you? How dare you, after all we’ve done for you?”

The deputies, she said, had come to her house and arrested her husband, taking him down to the jail, where they fingerprinted him and put him in a cell. His lawyer was arranging bail even as she
spoke, and Jerry would be out by the end of the day.

We didn’t know what we were up against, Doris said. We had picked a fight with the wrong rhino. Her husband knew the law inside and out. He’d won countless lawsuits. He had fought a
case all the way to the Supreme Court of the state of Rhode Island and had won. We would regret the day we started this. “No jury’s going to believe you lying sluts.”

At first I was stunned, but when Doris started threatening us and accusing us of lying, I got pretty steamed myself. “Don’t you get all high and mighty,” I said. “We have
an eyewitness. He’ll testify to what happened. Your husband hurt Liz, and now you’re pretending he’s a saint and talking about all you did for us?”

“Your sister’s a whore!” Doris shouted. “My husband hired her as his personal secretary, he paid her, he trained her, he trusted her, he bought her nice clothes, and he
treated her like a queen. We know the two of you were stealing from us. Your sister was drinking yesterday, and she put the moves on Jerry in the backseat of that car. When he turned her down, she
made up this bullshit story. She was out to get him all along because he had your worthless uncle fired. You think you’ve got your evidence? Well, we’ve got our evidence. We have a
vodka bottle with y’all’s fingerprints all over it as proof.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, since I’d never had a drink of vodka in my life and I was pretty sure Liz hadn’t, either, but I pushed it out of my mind. “You can try
to twist the facts as much as you want,” I said. “But you know your husband did this. I don’t care what a big shot he is, the truth will come out.”

“When the truth about you two comes out,” Doris said, “you won’t be able to show your skanky faces in this town. Mark my words. My husband will destroy you!”

Doris climbed back into the Le Mans, slammed the door, jerked the car into reverse, then gunned it down the driveway, tires spraying gravel. I watched with my hands on my hips, fighting the urge
to give her the finger because I knew Uncle Tinsley would find it appalling. “She thought she could scare us, but it didn’t work, did it?”

“This is going to be a shit storm,” Uncle Tinsley said.

It was the first time I had heard him use a curse word.

That evening Liz
announced there was absolutely no way she would consider going to school the next day. Neither Uncle Tinsley nor I
tried to talk her into it.

The next morning, as soon as I got to the bus stop, I could tell that everyone knew. Word spread quickly in a small town like Byler. All it took was one deputy mentioning to his brother-in-law
that Tinsley Holladay’s niece had filed charges against Jerry Maddox, and within hours it was the talk of the barbershop and the beauty parlor. The other kids were clearly discussing it, and
when they saw me, they started shushing each other, saying things like “Here she comes,” “Dummy up,” and “Where’s the other one?”

When I got to school, there was time before first period to go to the library, which always had a copy of the
Byler Daily News
. I expected Maddox’s arrest to be a big front-page
story because the paper usually played up anything local, no matter how small—a horse getting stuck in a pond, someone’s toolshed catching on fire, or a farmer growing a five-pound
tomato. The story wasn’t on the front page, or even the second or third page. I finally found it at the back, under a section called “Police Blotter.” The headline was “Mill
Boss Charged.” The article said:

I was shocked. I thought the story was a big deal, certainly bigger news than a five-pound tomato, and it involved a Byler heavyweight. Sure, people were gossiping about it, but they
didn’t know the real story. I’d been counting on the whole town reading in official detail exactly what had happened. I thought that was one way to punish Maddox and make sure he never
did it again.

The article didn’t even say “attempted rape,” as if the editors were afraid of spelling it out. “Assault.” What did that mean? It could mean anything or nothing.
From what people were going to read in the
Byler Daily News,
Maddox might as well have shoved some girl who sassed him in a parking-lot argument over a fender bender.

The rest of the day was just awful. In the halls, kids stared at me, looking away as soon as I caught their eye. Girls whispered and giggled and pointed. Guys smirked and in mocking, cheeping
voices said things like “Help! Help! I’m being molested!”

On my way to English class, I ran into Vanessa. She saw me and shook her head. “Going to the law,” she said. “Such a white thing to do.”

“What would you do?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t be getting into no car with Mr. Maddox in the first place,” she said. “You climb in the backseat with the boss man, you got to expect something’s going
to happen. That’s just the way it is.”

Liz decided she wasn’t going back to school the next day, either. In fact, she said, she was not leaving the house until the bruises on her face had gone away. It was
Friday, the day after the article, and things in the halls at school went from bad to worse. Kids kept snickering behind my back, throwing wadded-up paper at my head, and tripping me.

The football game that night was against the Orange Hornets. I hadn’t been much help to the pep squad that week, and Liz had hardly been in the mood to concoct any crowd-rousing rhymes or
puns. At the beginning of the week, I had come up with “Orange You Scared?” but Terri Pruitt, the pep squad adviser, thought it might leave some kids scratching their heads. Still, the
posters got made—the slogan was “Swat the Hornets”—and on Friday the whole school gathered in the gym for the weekly pep rally.