Off Season (40 page)

“No. I’ll call her. I’m sorry for waking you.”

“Don’t be sorry, Ben. I can understand why you’re upset.”

He stopped pacing and closed his eyes. “I just don’t get it, Jill. The last thing Rita said to me was ‘trust me.’ How can I do that?”

Jill was quiet a moment, then she said, “Well, she’s never let either one of us down, Ben. Maybe we both need to remember that.”

She was right. Damn, she was right.

“Yeah. I guess. Hey, how was your night? I saw the show. You were beautiful. Did Edwards try to attack you?”

“Yes. But I told him you’d string him up by the caps on his front teeth.”

He laughed a small laugh, but a laugh, nonetheless.

“Everything’s fine here, honey,” she said. “Now make yourself some coffee and try to relax. Why don’t you work on the plans for the netting shed today?”

“Thanks for the effort, but stop trying to distract me,” he said. “I’ll figure this out. I’ll call Rita right now and get it over with.”

“No, Ben,” Jill said firmly. “Let it go. I’ve known her forever, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to give her space. She’ll come around in her own time, on her own terms.” She paused for a second, then added, “As most of us do.”

Rita didn’t have any real video games, but she had this cool thing called Pac-Man that you plugged into the TV and made it eat up the screen. Well, not really, but it was better than nothing. Rita also had some old videos from the 1970s, way before Mindy was born, when people dressed funny and wore their hair long and straight, even boys.

Rita’s mother, Hazel, was nice, too. She helped Mindy learn how to make a knit and a purl and said she reminded her of Rita Mae when Rita Mae was a girl.

At night, over dinner, Charlie told real funny stories about old island fishermen and how they hid treasures in the secret room at the tavern. One time they even brought her there so she could see the tavern for herself.

And every night Rita tucked her in bed, kissed her forehead, and said “Sweet dreams.” Nobody had ever done that before, and at first it felt stupid, but now she kind of liked it. She wondered if this was how real families lived.

“Are you happy here, Mindy?” Dr. Reynolds asked in mid-February, when she’d been at Rita’s for two weeks.

“It’s better than home,” she told the doctor as they walked toward the lighthouse.

“In what way?”

“Lots of ways. Rita’s a good cook.”

“What about Charlie?”

Mindy rolled her eyes. She hoped the doctor wasn’t trying to talk about sex again. “He makes me laugh. And Hazel thinks that soon I’ll be able to make a pair of booties myself. Rita will need lots because she’s having two babies.” She sat down on the edge of the walkway that led to the lighthouse. The air was crisp, but the sun was shining. She shielded her eyes against the sharp glare off the water. “My mother’s in Caracas.”

“Venezuela?” The doctor crouched beside her and picked up a shell.

“Yeah. She met some friends in Aruba, and they took someone’s yacht over there.”

“Do you think she’ll be home soon?”

“No,” Mindy replied, lowering her head and scuffing her feet in the sand. “I don’t care.”

The doctor was quiet, then asked, “This is a beautiful shell, isn’t it?”

She was surprised the doctor didn’t say something else about her mother. She usually liked it when Mindy talked
about her. Mindy glanced at the fanned white shell. “Scallop shell,” she announced, because she knew all of them.

“In a way, it’s sad,” the doctor said. “If it weren’t for the scallop, this beautiful shell wouldn’t exist. But the rest of us in the world rarely get to see it until the scallop is gone, until the shell is left alone on the beach.”

“Wampum,” Mindy said.

“What?”

“Wampum. It’s the purple and white pieces of clamshells the Indians once used for money. Ben used to say the shell was real valuable, not when it was all together, but when it was in parts. Except to the clam.”

“Ben Niles?”

“Well. Yes.”

Dr. Reynolds set the shell back down on the sand. “Do you miss him?” she asked. “He was your friend.”

Mindy shrugged. She lowered her eyes to the small low-tide wave that licked the piling at the end of the pier. “He’ll never speak to me again,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. My mother will come back and get me, and I’ll be gone away soon.”

“Is that what you want?”

She didn’t reply.

“When will you go?”

“My mother said not until our affairs are in order, so I’m not sure what that means. By the end of the school year, I guess.”

“By then Mr. Niles might be in jail.”

That ripply feeling came into her stomach. “My mother said he won’t go to jail. But she said once he’s convicted, she’s going to sue him, and we’ll get the cash she deserves for everything he’s done.”

“What’s he done, Mindy?”

She shrugged again. “I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing.”

“Do you think it’s time to tell someone that?”

Mindy didn’t answer. She simply stood up, brushed the sand from herself, and said it was time to go home.

Rita stood at the kitchen sink, where she hadn’t spent this much time since Kyle was alive.

She would have thought it would make her nuts: her mother in the other room knitting booties as if Rita were having octuplets not twins; Charlie fussing out in the garage, building birdhouses, for God’s sake, happy as a clam because he now had a garage to mess around in. He also had a woman to sleep with—she had a feeling he was happy as a clam about that, too.

And now, cutting across the backyard were Mindy and Dr. Reynolds. Mindy was sort of skipping, as if she were happy to be home, back at this domestic palace, where the very pregnant woman who stood at the sink must have completely lost her undomesticated mind. The woman who had once connived to get as close to Mindy as she could hadn’t counted on becoming so damn attached to her, hadn’t counted on caring so damn much.

Rita shook her head and opened the back door to let Mindy inside.

“Hot chocolate on the stove,” she said.

Closing the door behind the girl, Rita went outside to walk Dr. Reynolds to her old Volvo.

“How’s it going?” she asked the doctor.

“Fine.”

“Is Mindy okay? Is she happy here?”

The doctor smiled. “She’s fine.”

They reached the car, and the doctor opened the door. Rita put her hand on the window to stop her. “Wait. There’s something I need to ask you.”

The doctor waited. Rita put her hands in the large pouch-pocket at the front of her sweatshirt. “I know you can’t tell me anything about Mindy’s … well, about her
state of mind. Nothing important, anyway. But I’m only using my instinct here when I say I’m trying to be the poor kid’s friend. See, I think this whole trial thing is a big fat lie, and I think Ben Niles didn’t do anything, but I think Mindy’s in too deep and too scared to say otherwise. It seems to me that if she has some kind of stability, maybe she’ll tell the truth as it really happened.” She shrugged. “Hell, the way I figure it, even if I’m wrong, at least Mindy will know someone cares about her.”

The doctor, of course, would not say anything concrete. But she did wink at Rita and say, “Keep doing what you’re doing. Just please don’t disappoint her.”

Rita wasn’t a hundred percent sure what the woman meant, but she figured that was her way of saying she was on the right track.

Jill had no idea how she was able to stay on track, how she could tune out what was really going on in her mind and sit next to that ass she’d almost married every night on the set—the coveted, long-awaited
network
set—and act as if she were the most together woman on planet Earth, seated next to the most together man.

She had no idea how she’d sobbed all afternoon on Valentine’s Day when Ben’s three dozen red roses arrived, yet managed to smile and look clear-eyed by evening.

Nor did she know how she went to bed every evening in her Plaza suite and did not die from the loneliness of the empty other side of the bed. She tried not to obsess about what she would do if this was what would happen night after night for months and then years if Ben were convicted, if Ben went to jail.

Jill could have gone home on weekends—Ben, of course, could not leave the island to come here—but there were stories to plan and mail to weed through and she’d decided it was better to stay and get through it, all of it.

She had no idea how she did it, but Addie said it was because she was a pro, that Addie had known it all along, even if Jill herself had not.

And though Jill hated to admit it, it was great to be back to work, real work, not freelance stringer stuff that made her feel as if she’d been demoted back to her apprentice-reporter days. Surprisingly, her fan mail was arriving in much greater abundance that Christopher’s—a fact Addie cheered as if the letters had been written to her, even though Christopher had been her client long before Jill had been. But Addie told her she’d always known he was an overblown jerk.

“I wonder how many people would write if they knew about Ben,” Jill said, sifting through the latest mailbag, when the month of February had almost finished its cold, lonely penance, when the only heat in New York came from the fired-up ratings, and when the only warmth in Jill’s heart came from knowing that soon she’d be home. For better or for worse.

“That reminds me,” Addie said. “Have you talked with your husband today?”

“Not yet. He usually calls after lunch. Why?”

Addie just smiled.

On the morning of the fourth day of the last week that Jill was gone, Rick Fitzpatrick called Ben. Ben had been killing time repainting the sewing room, because he was close to jumping out of his skin, an old saying he’d never fully understood until these recent months.

“Hey, Rick,” he said, grateful for the interruption.

“Bartlett called,” the attorney said quickly. “They’ve come up with something you might be interested in.”

Ben said a quick prayer but steeled himself against disappointment.

“There’s a technique he wants to try that’s been used a
few times. He’ll have to get the judge to approve it, but he wants to take Mindy back to the scene of the alleged crime.”

Ben loved the way Rick said “alleged,” as if always conscious he was speaking with the defendant, his paying client. “What good will that do?”

“The attorneys will go. And the judge. And the jury. Mindy will have to reenact exactly what happened.”

Ben wasn’t sure what he thought about that.

“It’s a great idea, Ben. It will really put her to the test.”

“Jesus, Rick, she’s just a kid.”

“Do I have to remind you your life is in her hands?”

“But I thought she wouldn’t have to even show up at the trial. I thought that was what her video deposition was all about.”

“I thought so, too, but I was wrong. Bartlett said that by going to a jury trial, we have the right to cross-examine her.”

So Mindy was going to take the stand. It did not escape Ben that Rick had not known that, but Bartlett had. One point for the high price tag, he supposed.

He sighed. “Does she know?”

“I have no idea.” Rick paused, as if he were unsure what to say next, as if he had not expected Ben to be quite so … underwhelmed. “These are positive things for your case, Ben. It’s good news.”

“Oh,” Ben replied. But as he envisioned Mindy sitting in a witness chair, he felt sorry for her, whether anyone liked it or not.

“There’s something else,” Rick added. “Bartlett is going to bring in experts who will testify that Mindy clearly was not traumatized.”

“How do they know? They’ve never met her.”

“They’ve seen her deposition.”

“Oh” was all he could say again.

“Ben?” Rick asked. “I know Herb Bartlett can spin
circles around me in the courtroom, but I need to know that you’re okay with all of this.”

“No,” Ben laughed, “I’m not okay with any of it. But I don’t have a lot of choice.”

Rick paused, then said, “I’m not an expert like Bartlett, but I’ve done some homework.” He sighed. “A guy I spoke with in the Midwest went to jail for two years because he insisted on going to trial and refused to take a plea.”

“Because he was innocent?”

“It looks that way. It was one of those nasty divorce cases. No evidence. His word against hers.”

The words reverberated in Ben’s mind. “But he’s out now,” he said, “and he survived.”

“Yeah,” Rick said, “but he said it wasn’t worth two years to stand on principle.”

Ben scraped a bit of paint that had dried on his hand.

“Another man—this one in Florida—was given life. No penetration. No physical evidence. No previous complaints.” He did not have to add that it was his word against the girl’s.

“Why are you telling me this, Rick?”

“Because I want to be sure you understand what you may be up against. If you plead guilty, at the worst you will get house arrest.”

Ben nodded. “I know that. And I also know I didn’t do anything, and I’m not going to say I did. But thanks for the news,” he said, then added, “I guess.” He said good-bye and went back to the sewing room, promising himself that if the phone rang again, he was not going to answer it because he’d had all the good news he could take for one day.

The night of Jill’s final appearance on
Good Night, USA
, Maurice Fischer waited in the wings like a groupie in awe, not a media mogul in charge. As the credits rolled and the lights criss-crossed the set, he looked as if he were about to dance onto the stage and toss flower bouquets at the anchor desk.