Broken Grace (18 page)

“I guess.”

“Fucking strange MO for a robbery. And was there a connection between this Jones and the Abbotts?”

“None mentioned.”

“I want to know more.”

“I just don’t see—”

Bishop interrupted him. “Here’s the thing. I don’t know shit about who went down for the parents’ murder, but both of these crimes are connected to Grace. The victims all died in their beds, killed by shotguns. Just feels a little coincidental.”

“What are you thinking?”

Bishop finally took off his coat and put it on the back of his chair. “I just want to be sure we don’t have a sweet little twenty-year-old on our hands who solves her problems by killing them.”

NINETEEN

G
RACE FINALLY WOKE AROUND NINE O’CLOCK
and came downstairs. Lisa was dressed and pacing the kitchen floor. “Oh good, you’re up. Have some coffee and take your meds,” she said, handing her a mug and the pills. “I found you an attorney. We need to be there in an hour.”

“Okay,” Grace said. “I’ll get dressed.” She took the coffee and pills with her upstairs. She poured the coffee down the drain of the bathroom sink and tucked the pills into her front jeans pocket. There was no fighting Nurse Lisa, but none of this made her feel better. She could live with the lingering headache, but she couldn’t live with those side effects. And Lisa’s coffee sucked.

They drove for about thirty minutes to Saint Joseph, passing the small downtown area until they found a half-vacant strip mall. Lisa pulled the car into the lot and parked in front of the office. The door was covered with advertisements:
DUI
?
D
ON’T
W
ORRY!,
U
NDER
I
NVESTIGATION?
C
ALL ME!,
S
EX
C
RIMES,
V
IOLENT
C
RIMES,
M
EDICAL
M
ARIJUANA,
W
HITE-
C
OLLAR
C
RIME—
I’
VE DONE IT ALL!

“You sure about this guy?” Grace asked. “Doesn’t look all that professional.”

“Hey, he had the best ad in the yellow pages. It’ll be fine.”

They went into a plywood-paneled office where an older woman in a large beehive hairdo sat behind a desk, talking on the phone. Lisa told her who they were and the woman smiled, passed her a clipboard seeking basic information and a contractual agreement for payment, and pointed to the chairs against the wall. When the attorney came out to greet them, Grace felt no better. His toupee was askew and his shirt was desperately fighting to stay tucked in to his size-forty pants. Nothing about him suggested legal prowess. The women stood and the man asked that Grace alone come into his office. Lisa seemed reluctant, but he insisted. “I know that family is always concerned and wants to help, but we need to maintain our attorney/client privilege, so it’s gotta just be her and me, okay?” Lisa smiled and sat back down. Grace followed him into his office.

The odor of a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin wafted through the air, a surprisingly familiar scent. He crumpled the wrapper, still on his desk, and tossed it in the trash. “Breakfast of champions,” he joked while gesturing for her to take a seat, as he took his behind the massive and equally disheveled desk. She stared at the placard facing her.
O
ZZY
M
ARSHALL,
E
SQ.

“So, tell me what you’re up against. What’s going on?”

Grace told him about her car accident, her memory loss, Michael’s death, what she’d learned from Dave, what the police had found, and how she feared the evidence might be pointing her way. “In fact,” she added, “they want to give me a polygraph, which I don’t mind because I honestly can’t remember anything, so I can’t imagine it will hurt, but they’re asking about my relationship with Dave, and I don’t know how to handle this.”

“Understandable.”

“I thought maybe I should get some advice. I don’t know what happened or what to believe, so I don’t know how cooperative I should be.”

“You did the right thing coming to me.”

She looked around the room again, unsure he was right. “Have you ever dealt with a . . .” The word caught in her throat. “A murder?”

“Sure,” he said, leaning back and stroking that fake hair on top of his head.

It wasn’t a convincing reply.

Marshall sat forward. “Don’t be fooled by all that marketing for petty shit. I need to do whatever comes to me to bring in the bacon, but I’m a litigator. I do it all. I may not have been the top of my class, but I get my clients off. Doesn’t matter the charge; I’m the shit,” he said, tossing his pen onto the desk, as if that speech would win her over. “Don’t worry.”

She did.

“I want to be by your side whenever you meet with the cops. And I want to talk to your doctors at the hospital and see the police records from the car accident before you do a poly. I’ll contact the police and tell them that we’ll have to delay until I can get up to speed.”

Grace took a breath and continued. “I’ve learned that I lived with Michael, and we got engaged on Thursday before the murder. He was killed sometime on Saturday, I think. Apparently, we got in a big fight Friday night and I went to my sister’s, asking to stay with her. I was in a car crash the next morning. I guess that’s about when he died. I have no alibi.”

“Your sister won’t say you were with her in the morning?”

“Well, I don’t expect her to lie. She woke and I was gone. She told me that I’d said I was going to get my things from our house. But we haven’t told the police that part yet. I don’t know if I actually got there. Maybe I got in a crash on the way. She’s trying to protect me, but I wonder if we should share everything. If they find out, it might look like I was trying to hide something.”

“What were the medications in your name?”

“Xanax. I guess I was an insomniac. I’d started seeing a therapist, who I met with yesterday. I’m hoping she can help me remember. The cops found pictures of Michael with another woman in the house—so I’m guessing they think I might have killed him out of jealousy or anger.”

“And you’ve seen the photos?”

“Yeah. The police showed me.”

“Did you recognize the woman?”

“No. But you can’t see her face. Only her backside.”

“What else?”

“There were drugs in the house, large money withdrawals. Lisa says that he was a bad guy—and gambled and smoked pot.”

Marshall took lots of notes and threw the pen down again. “Okay. We’ve got a lot to work with here. There are plenty of potentials, and my job, if you end up being charged, is not to prove that you didn’t do it. It’s to prove that there are plenty of other potential scenarios. We just need reasonable doubt. Worst case, even if all arrows point to you, we’ve got the drug defense.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are some pretty serious and documented side effects from antianxiety meds—sleepwalking, sleep driving, sleep eating, there have been cases even of sleep murder. The perps weren’t conscious when they committed the acts, so they couldn’t be found to have ‘intended’ harm—there was no intent.” Grace’s mind returned to the taped session, to her unconscious eating while on Xanax.

“In fact, I’ll see if we can find out what drugs were in your system when you got to the hospital. If you took Xanax the night before the murder, we might be on to something.”

“That happens?”

“Sure. It’s rare, of course, but it’s happened.”

“Are you saying that I could have driven over there, killed him, and left—all while sleeping?”

“It’s possible. Obviously we wouldn’t say that unless the evidence is clearly pointing at you. Right now it sounds like they’re still fishing. But my point is, even if it looks bad for you, it’s a great thing that you were on meds. It’s a great thing that you got in a car crash. It all works. And this sleepwalking stuff—it’s a real defense. Hell, it could even explain your car accident. You hit a tree, right?”

“Yeah, no other cars involved, no witnesses. The cops said it was a deer.”

“This is a pretty interesting possibility.” He leaned back in his chair. “Give me the names of the officers you’ve been speaking with. I’ll call and let them know they need to deal with me. And if they call you to the station again, we go together. If someone shows up with a warrant for your arrest, I’m the first call. Got it?”

“Okay,” she said, feeling slightly better. He wasn’t a total moron.

“If you remember anything, call me. Let’s stay in front of this. And I’ll advise you not to discuss this meeting with your sister or anyone else—lest you open the door for the prosecution to challenge our privilege if we need it.”

“Okay.”

He stood and came around his desk, signaling the end of the meeting. “Be sure Betty out there at reception has your credit card imprint before you leave. It’s a hundred for today. We’ll go hourly until you get charged, then we can move to a fee schedule for the defense. Sound good?”

“Yeah.” She couldn’t believe this was her life.

After dealing with reception, they left, and Lisa finally turned to her for information. “So, what did he say?”

“He said he’ll represent me if I need him and to contact him if anything else happens.”

“Does he think it looks bad for you?”

“He told me not to talk about it. I guess it puts the whole attorney/client privilege in jeopardy.”

“Oh. Okay.” She put her arm around Grace. “See, it’s going to be okay,
Gracie. Now, how are you feeling? I know those meds can wipe you out.”

“Oh yeah, I’m exhausted,” she lied.

Lisa dropped her at the house, told her to rest, and went to work. Grace relished the time alone. She had to finish listening to the doctor’s tape. She went to the kitchen where she’d left the key to the truck, but it wasn’t on the counter. It wasn’t on the hook. She opened one drawer, then another, then another. Then each of the cabinets. It was gone.

She searched the main floor and moved upstairs. Lisa’s closet was jammed with clothes, most of which were on the floor. Paintings lined the walls in the small connected room, and she suddenly pictured her mother again—that paint-stained apron, the disheveled hair, a brush in her hand. Grace sat on the floor in front of a brightly colored abstract that bore the name
Elsi
in the bottom right corner—her mom. She studied the flowers, birds, globs of paint that created texture she wanted to reach out and touch, like layers of thoughts and ideas had come together. It was joyous, almost celebratory. She felt along the patterns, examining the tiny details, and noticed some little phrases, affirmations, hidden treasures lightly embedded into the piece:
Family is forever, Love, Peace
. And then, written in the top left corner, she saw her name:
Grace
. A few inches below, written on the petal of a flower with a slightly darker green color and a fine-tipped brush:
Lisa
. She searched for more, like her mother was talking to her through the painting. And then on the petal of a sunflower, written in a delicate orange tint:
Mary
.

Her breath caught in her chest, and the light faded from the room as her mind hurled down a dark tunnel. She heard her mother’s bloodcurdling scream, the depth of a despair from long ago. She fell back, the weight of revelation pushing her toward the floor.
Mary
. Tears fell from her closed eyes as she felt the loss. It all made sense now—those initials on the back of the butterfly table, linked together forever,
G
and
M
; the daisy dresses. Mary. Her sister. Her twin.

It had been Mary on that swing. Mary was the one who fell, she suddenly remembered. They’d always felt each other’s pain. They’d slept in the same bed, shared clothes and toys and dolls. They’d been inseparable. “We were only five,” she said aloud as the pain of losing her twin came back like a violent storm. Mary’s death had become a dark cloud that covered this house. It had covered everything.

The painting beside the colorful abstract mirrored that darkness. It was smeared in black, purple, blues, greens, hints of yellow, the brushstrokes weaker. The lightness, optimism, gone. There were no names or words in the piece. She compared the works side by side and sensed her mother’s presence. This was Mom: sometimes exquisitely cheerful and loving, other times dark and sad. And Mary’s death had brought with it the darkest period. It wasn’t a memory or a guess. She just knew.

Grace stood and looked out the window at the backyard, the woods, the shed off to the side. It was the same view her mother must have had when she painted. How did her mother fit in to these traumatic sensations? The screaming, the fear? And where was her dad? She looked down at her arm, at the little scars. It was a horrifying thought, that her father could have done that. How could she forget something like that? Then again, it was almost too disturbing to envision. She wondered what else he might have done.

She went back to Lisa’s closet. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she began digging through the pile. It was probably a figurative inclination, but she felt compelled to dig.

A garbage bag full of clothes sat in the back of the closet, under mounds of Lisa’s clothes. Grace began riffling through it. Men’s clothes. She pulled out several items and thought of the dad she remembered. That vision with the wheelbarrow. He was tall. He was a big man. These clothes wouldn’t fit him. And they didn’t seem old. A Green Day T-shirt, skinny jeans, too small for someone his size. So whose clothes were they? Why were they hidden in the back of Lisa’s closet?

She sat on Lisa’s bed, surveying the rest of the space. She’d asked her so many times for information about their past, but what had she really learned? That Michael had a temper? That their father hurt them? It wasn’t enough. She’d said Grace was lucky not to remember, that she’d spent years trying to forget. Bullshit. There was nothing lucky about this. Grace was sick of being protected from whatever the truth was. Nothing could be worse than not knowing. And Lisa was obviously hiding more than the key to the truck. She felt sure of it.

She scoured the bedside tables, then moved on to the dresser. The drawers were overstuffed with clothes, 90 percent of which were black, but in the bottom drawer, she saw a small box. She sat in the midst of the mayhem she’d created, opened it, and found pill bottles. At least ten bottles—Ativan, Valium, Lithium, Clozapine—prescriptions for Lisa, for their mom, for Grace. The dates were old, some four years old, some ten. Some bottles were empty, some had a few pills, and one had a funny clink when she shook it. Grace opened the bottle—the key! She got up, put on her coat and boots, and headed for the truck.