Order in the Court (4 page)

“You saw the defendant with a gun in his hand?” He pointed to Dustin, as though I didn’t know who the defendant was. I didn’t look over at him, though I was tempted. I didn’t want to see the look on his face.

“Yes.”

“What kind of gun was it?”

“A shotgun. The barrels had been sawed off so they were shorter, but I could still tell it was a shotgun.”

“What was the defendant wearing?”

“He had a Cincinnati Reds baseball cap on his head, turned backward. He had on jeans and a hoodie. It was navy.” I was shaking, but I did my best to disguise it by sitting a little straighter. “His face was covered in little drops of blood. He shot Jake Hastings in the head right in front of me.”

Haywood said, “What did you do next?”

And then I said, “I hid in a bathroom stall. It had an Out of Order sign on the front. I sat on the water tank and had my feet on the toilet seat.” It was just as we rehearsed. “He searched the men’s washroom first. I could hear him kicking in the doors. Then he came into the ladies’, and I held my breath. He kicked in all the stall doors, but mine had the sign on it.” A tiny sob escaped. I couldn’t help it. My heart was racing. He was sitting
right there
, nearly as close to me as he’d been in that bathroom. “He didn’t find me. He didn’t know I was there.”

“LET’S GO
to the bathroom.”

Abby took me by the arm and steered me away from the small group I’d been on the edge of, wavering between being part of the conversation and outside of it. Sasha waved us off and continued to talk animatedly with two boys in our English class. He was sweet on one of them, but he wouldn’t tell me which.

“I don’t like public restrooms, actually,” I said, but she steered me straight into the ladies’ room at the end of the hall. It was brightly lit, with cream and pink ceramic tiles over the floor and creeping up the walls to waist height. Abby bent herself in half and walked across the row of stalls, checking for feet. It was empty.

Abby straightened her back and then corrected the fall of her loose shirt, which had gaped open at the front when she bent over. I politely looked away while she adjusted her cleavage in the mirror. “So we’ve got to talk,” she said, and I ended my examination of the mismatched ceiling tiles to look at her again.

“About what?” I asked, feeling foolish standing so close to the doorway but not wanting to walk farther into the bathroom. A feeling of unease crept up my spine, a chill I just couldn’t shake. It happened in most public bathrooms, except single-occupant ones. In emergencies I sought out the disability bathroom. Almost every place had one now.

“I like to think I’m a bit of a murder buff,” Abby admitted, and I felt a queer sensation in my stomach, like it was attempting aerobatics under my rib cage. “I’m even thinking about majoring in criminal psychology.” I stood there, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It came just as I knew it would: “When you told me where you came from, I wanted to ask if you went to the same high school as those girls who were killed, but I didn’t. I looked you up instead.”

I bit my lip and clenched my fists by my sides. I refused to let her see how rattled I was. Would I be “murder-girl” here too? Would people start staring when I walked by, whispering behind their hands like I couldn’t see them:
Do you think she’s crazy now? She saw her friends get murdered; wouldn’t you be a bit crazy after that? Maybe she was in on it! How else did she get away?

Abby plowed on, oblivious to my inner dialogue. “Corey, you’re the unnamed witness, aren’t you? You were there. Those girls were your friends.” I met Abby’s eyes and saw not the morbid curiosity I was expecting but concern. She looked like she wanted me to say no, to prove her suspicions incorrect. “You saw them die, didn’t you?”

“I saw them
after
they were dead!” I felt the need to defend myself, to have Abby know the truth. I don’t know why I felt this way, because she wasn’t accusing me of anything, but I did and I reacted fairly violently. “I wasn’t next to them when it happened! I only heard the shots!” All the fight went out of me when I saw Abby’s reaction to my outburst, her pale cheeks hollowing around an inhaled breath of surprise. My face felt hot, and my eyes were burning with shame when I added quietly, “I was hiding like a coward in the bathroom the whole time.”

Abby didn’t say anything. She crossed her arms over her chest and stood there, watching me have my breakdown like an objective third-party observer. As if
she
hadn’t caused it, as if
she
weren’t the one who brought it up.

“I don’t know who the
hell
you think you are,” I said scathingly, my voice shaking with barely controlled fury, “bringing up the worst moment of my life like it’s yours to dissect, but I will
not
be bullied into talking about it. I don’t talk about it because I don’t want anyone here to know. Do you think it’s
easy
being the murder-girl? Do you think it’s
easy
that I can’t walk around my hometown without getting stared at and whispered about? Do you think I
enjoy
feeling like a circus freak all the time?”

My chest was heaving with anger and frustration. I bit my tongue. All the hurt had come spilling out of me in waves, and I felt drained and disappointed. I thought I’d had a friend in Abby, in her easy banter and silly puns, but she’d figured it out. She just wanted the inside scoop on the deaths of my friends.

“How long have you known?” I asked finally, when the tension between us became too much for me to bear. The real question was
: How long have you been lying to me?
but I suspected Abby didn’t hear that side of it.

“Since the day after we met,” she said. She tucked a lock of her too-red hair behind her ear. “I kept wanting to say it, but it was never the right time.”

“And you thought that
now
was the right time? A month later?” I felt betrayal, alongside the disappointment that I hadn’t been able to keep my secret to myself. “I thought we were friends.” The last phrase slipped out unbidden. I snapped my mouth closed.

“Oh, we are!” Abby took a step toward me, and I stepped back instinctually, which put me nearly to the bathroom door. I was close enough to touch the door if I turned. I could just walk out and never talk to Abby again.

“We are friends, I swear!” she said, putting her hands up in a defensive posture. “I wasn’t even going to tell you I knew, but with the change in plea I thought—I thought you might want someone to talk to about—”

I frowned, and my instinct to run abated. “What change in plea?” I asked sharply. “What are you talking about?”

Abby retreated a few steps and dropped her backpack on the damp pink countertop, riffling through it for a few moments before pulling out a folded page of newspaper. She opened it and smoothed it on the leg of her black jeans before starting to read aloud. “‘In a change of events for last summer’s gruesome murders of four local teens, the Portland District Attorney’s Office has rescinded their plea arrangement with alleged shooter Dustin Adams, 26, which included a guilty plea to the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter in exchange for sworn testimony in an undisclosed related case. Adams’s lawyers now claim that the signed confession given by Adams on the night of his arrest was coerced through police brutality and scare tactics from biased members of the rural police force—’”

I was across the bathroom before I could hear her read the rest of the small blurb on page four of the newspaper. The header
Daily Crime
meant nothing to me. I hadn’t even known there were papers dedicated solely to crime reporting.

“Where did they get this?” I murmured, taking the paper from Abby’s hands when she offered it. I scanned through the blurb, which included nothing more than the hearing date to enter the defendant’s new plea and a promise of “
more information to come when available
.”

“You didn’t know about it?” Abby asked, and I shook my head.

“No!” My head was spinning. “He’s going to say he didn’t do it. He’s going to get away with killing them, and it’s all my fault,” I nearly sobbed. I didn’t realize I was crying until I felt Abby’s hands on my shoulders, steadying me. A tear caught in the corner of my mouth and I reached up to wipe it away furiously.

“I’m sure it’s not your fault,” she said soothingly. “How could it have been your fault?”

“When he was arrested,” I said, “it was at the funeral. I didn’t identify him as the killer until I saw him at the funeral, and Ricky’s dad jumped him to stop him from running before the cops got there—he roughed him up a bit, I guess. I didn’t see. But if he’s going to claim that the police hurt him, he has all the evidence in the world because I couldn’t hold my tongue and call 9-1-1 quietly like a normal person instead of freaking out and screaming.”

Abby rubbed up and down my arms gently. “You couldn’t have known,” she said simply. “You saw the man who killed your friends and you reacted the way anyone would in that situation. That doesn’t make this your fault. It just means that there’ll be a criminal trial if he pleads not guilty.”

“Can I have this?” I asked suddenly, holding up the newspaper page. Abby nodded.

“Yah-ah, I guess,” she said in a little singsong voice, shrugging. “I can get another copy.” I opened my book bag from the side and slipped the page into it. “Why?”

“I need to have words with my attorney,” I said, grimacing a sarcastic kind of smile before turning tail and walking out of the bathroom. Abby followed me, taking one long step for every two of my much shorter ones.

“Hey! Where are you going?” I heard Sasha say as I strode past him and the two boys from our class. “We have an English lecture in ten minutes!”

“Take notes for me,” I called over my shoulder, pushing open the heavy doors and heading outside. It was breezy, and the wind caught my coat, pulling it tight around my neck. Feeling strangled, I clawed the fabric away from my throat. I probably looked like a maniac.

“Are you really skipping class?” Abby asked, stopping just inside the door, holding it open.

I turned to her and nodded. “I need to go home. This is more important.”

“That’s not like you.” Abby put her hands on her hips. “Your grades are important to you. Can’t it wait until after class? Nothing’s going to happen in the meantime.” For someone with enough black kohl under her eyes to graffiti a building, she sounded incredibly convincing. I followed her back into the school just in time to join Sasha as he walked into the lecture hall.

I went to class and then took the bus home, changing buses three times. The whole ride I spent fuming, the bubbling anger at finding out something so crucial about the case from a tabloid increasing with every mile. I was
there
. I had a right to know. Why did nobody
tell
me these things?

I stormed up the front steps to our house when I got there, slammed the door behind me when I entered. My shoes were kicked off instead of placed nicely on the mat. My coat was hung up, but not neatly.

“Who’s that banging around?” my dad asked as he came out of the office in the back room. He took one look at me and said, “Uh oh, girlie on a rampage. Everyone look out!”

I walked past him into the office, where I knew my mother would be. She was always home early on Tuesdays, which was the reason I had to take the bus rather than catch a ride home with her. I dropped my book bag onto her desk and pulled out the slightly crumpled newspaper article.

“Did you know about this?” I asked, holding the paper like a weapon. “You had to have known about this. Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

My mother laughed lightly, her deflecting laugh, and said, “Slow down, Corinna. What are you talking about?”

“This!” I shoved the paper at her, put it onto the pile of folders she had spread open in front of her. “Dustin Adams changing his plea! I had to learn it from the paper, of all places.”

The color drained from my mother’s face as she skimmed the article. “I wasn’t informed either. How did this get out so fast?” Her hand found the receiver of the telephone on her desk. “I need to make some calls.” Her fingers were already pushing buttons, dialing the district attorney’s direct line. She waved me away, but I sat down in the only other chair in the room, the one behind my father’s desk, and crossed my arms to wait.

She made six phone calls. After each one, her face became progressively redder. I sat and watched and listened as she made inquiries of the district attorney, the police department, and several other people whose names I didn’t recognize. Finally, after being put on hold three times in one phone call, she found herself talking to the new prosecutor of the case.

“I want to be kept in the loop. My daughter shouldn’t have to find out details of this case from the papers, for goodness’ sake. We should have been on that list. I agree that the families needed to know first, but one extra phone call wasn’t going to put you on overtime, and my daughter is the only chance you have at winning this case. You can’t risk antagonizing us so early in the game.”

She began flipping through her day planner, finally settling on a date. “She has class in the morning, but we can do one o’clock. Yes, I’m representing her. She’s seventeen. Jesus, doesn’t anyone tell you anything? Of course not. What did you say your name was again?” She began scribbling in the day planner. “Well, Mr. Haywood, you’re lucky we’re being so cooperative. Good day.” She hung up and looked at me. “I’ve made an appointment for us to meet with the prosecuting attorney.”

My dad cleared his throat. He stood in the doorway, holding two steaming mugs. One he offered to my mom, black coffee, and the other he handed to me, hot chocolate. He must’ve left and come back when he heard us arguing.

“So,” he said once we’d both sipped gratefully at our hot drinks and relaxed a little. “Anyone want to fill me in on what’s going on? From the sound of it, all hell’s broken loose.”

“The Adams boy has broken his plea agreement. His lawyer has convinced him he has a case for police brutality and coercion, and they’re trying to get the confession thrown out. If it works, he’ll plead not guilty, and there will be a trial.”