Rosie O'Dell (37 page)

“And further to my objection,” shouted Dylan, “this witness is the mother of
Thomas Sharpe, the boyfriend of the complainant, and it is becoming obvious from
Ms. Barrett’s questions that he has obtained information from his mother
contrary to the Bill of Rights and passed it on to the prosecution. Any abuse of
process going on here is—”

“Objection!” screeched Lucy Barrett. “Contrary to the Bill of Rights! That is
the most ridiculous—”

“Order,” bawled the judge. “Sit down and keep quiet, both of you. Ms. Barrett,
I said sit down. This is a pretty pass. An objection to an objection to an
objection to an objection. Mr. Dylan, keep quiet, I said. Now, both of you,
conduct yourselves like the officers of this Supreme Court you are supposed to
be. I assume neither of you wants me to declare a mistrial and force you to do
this all over again. Ms. Barrett, draw this line of questioning to a quick
conclusion.”

“Mrs. Sharpe, when you told your husband what had gone on in the
principal’s office with Dr. Rothesay, did he give you his opinion on what you
should do?”

“Yes, he said they were right. Without evidence I had to drop it.”

“And you followed his advice and proceeded no further?”

“I followed my own feelings. My husband’s advice supported my own
feelings.”

“Did you have any doubts about dropping it?” asked Lucy.

“I had some lingering doubts, yes, but no one else, all intelligent, concerned
people—principal, teacher, wife—seemed to have any real doubts on the matter. I
could only assume any lingering doubts I might have had were wrong.”

“And so you joined the conspiracy to do nothing.”

“Conspiracy! No. I had to make a judgment call as a result of having no
concrete evidence to support me.”

“But as a friend and an experienced nurse, you still had fears and suspicions
derived from your observations, correct?”

“I still had some, yes.”

“As you have testified, your fears were strong and worrisome enough to cause
you to discuss them with ten or a dozen people. I put it to you that you didn’t
continue to pursue your fears because of a greater fear, the fear of your
husband’s wrath.”

“That is absolutely wrong. I had no fear of my husband whatsoever. I had no
evidence.”

“I worded my question too vaguely, perhaps. Because of your husband’s own fear
that he might be implicated by the machinations of a clever manipulator,
correct?”

“That may have been a small part of it, but mainly—”

“A large part of it, I put to you.”

“How much is large? I’m telling you it was a small part.”

“Large or small may be semantics, but the fact is that because of your
husband’s concerns for his professional reputation, you did not report your
strong suspicions of sexual abuse of the twelve-year-old daughter of your very
best friend to the authorities who might have uncovered the necessary
evidence.”

“That’s totally unfair. You weren’t there. You’re the big genius in hindsight.
I’d like to see you in the same circumstances. Everyone knows in these cases
that when mud is thrown at a professional person, some of it sticks, and
I—”

“Thank you, Mrs. Sharpe, no further questions.”

Dylan rose for redirect. “Assuming, Mrs. Sharpe, that you and your husband, two
professional persons of impeccable character, reputation, and strength, were
quivering in your boots—as presented by Ms. Barrett in her best TV courtroom
style—assume that ridiculous notion for a moment and tell us of your perception
of the mental health of Rosie O’Dell at the time. Would you characterize it as
stable or unstable?”

“Objection,” said Lucy Barrett. “She is not a psychiatrist.”

“No, but we’re not talking about a clinical diagnosis of Rosie, we are talking
about the state of mind of Mrs. Sharpe herself at the time she made certain
decisions, which is what Ms. Barrett kept trotting out before this court.”

“You may answer the question on that basis,” said the judge.

“Rosie seemed extremely unstable at that time. That was part of my fears for
her, that she was ill emotionally and not able to cope with whatever might be
happening to her.”

“How would you characterize her imagination during the twelve years you were
close to her?”

“Rosie was very intelligent and always had an active and fertile imagination. I
had the feeling after her father’s death that she may have been in the grip of
morbid imaginings, confusing fantasy with reality, and extremely
vulnerable.”

“Your slight fears for your husband, which Ms. Barrett just had a field day
with—did your knowledge of Rosie’s fertile imagination and of her confusing of
fantasy and reality have any effect on those fears?”

“Yes, I have to confess that one of my concerns was the possibility of false
allegations from Rosie concerning my husband. We used to be very close. She was
our godchild. She called me Aunt Gladys. She spent a lot of time at our place.
My husband was an obvious target, especially if, in her frame of mind, she were
to be manipulated. It was a concern.”

“So, Mrs. Sharpe, tell me if I have this right or not. Far from leaving the
daughter of your best friend twisting in the wind of sexual abuse because of
your own selfish concerns and your cowardice, as so nobly portrayed by the
prosecution, you felt you had a well-grounded fear of false accusation from the
complainant herself against your husband if you continued to press this
matter?”

“That would be correct.”

AT THE LUNCH BREAK
, I walked out of
the courtroom into the lobby, stunned. My girlfriend’s lawyer had just called my
mother and father yellow, self-serving cowards. My mother had just pronounced my
girlfriend off her rocker.

“Hi, Tom.” It was Dad, waiting for me. “Your mother seems to think Rosie’s
lawyer threw a few curves at her.”

“Why, what’d she say?”

“She said, ‘Ask Tom.’ How’d you figure it went?”

“Hard to say.” I looked around. “Where is she?”

“She’s gone out to the car. She didn’t want to stick around here. She was
livid.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Your mother wanted me to pick her up afterwards because it’s so hard to find
parking. We’d better go. I don’t want your mother out there by herself too
long.”

“Dad, I’m waiting for Rosie. You go on.”

“Oh. Okay. I just thought that since I was here we could… Anyway, I’ll see you
later. I want to talk to you about what happened in there, get another
perspective. Nobody’s too happy after a cross-examination, so your mother
might—”

“Hello, Uncle Joe.” Rosie was approaching.

“Hello, Rosie.” Dad walked away. “I’ll see you later today, Tom.”

Rosie looked at his retreating back, her brow furrowed. Then she turned to me.
“I had no idea your mother was going to be subjected to questions like that. If
I’d known—”

“Tom, Rosie asked me to explain something to you.” Lucy Barrett was coming up
behind me. “We operate under an adversarial system of justice. I must exercise
my professional duty to do everything legitimate to advance the case for the
prosecution. You see, it’s not just Rosie’s case, it is society’s, and therefore
I am unable to protect any private person’s sensibilities, or pull any punches
in that regard.”

Unable to pull any punches? I thought. The defence guy just clobbered you
across the head with a crowbar because you didn’t pull any punches. But I didn’t
speak, not wanting Rosie to know I believed my mother had badly hurt her
case.

“Your mother’s characterization of Rosie as unstable,” said Lucy Barrett, “and
capable of false accusations, came as a complete surprise to me. She never
mentioned it when I was interviewing her. Did she ever say any
thing like that to you?”

“No, not that I can remem—”

“That’s what I thought. She must have made it up on the spot to cover her
tracks. It did some damage to our case. Tom, I’m going to ask the judge for
leave to call you as a witness to give rebuttal evidence that your mother never,
ever spoke to you of—”

“What?” said Rosie. “Wait now, Lucy. You and I are going to have to talk about
that first.”

“Well, we’ll have to do it fast, over sandwiches at the office. I have to ask
the judge at the first opportunity this afternoon. So let’s go. Tom, you
too.”

“I said I want to talk to you about that first,” Rosie snapped.

“All right, Rosie. We all need to relax. Tom, you’ll understand it if I don’t
have time to drop you off at your house.”

“We’ll make time,” said Rosie. “It’s raining out.”

“It’s okay.” I headed out into the downpour, pulling away from Rosie’s
resistance on my arm. “I want to walk.”

At home I towelled off my head in the bathroom and entered the kitchen. Mom and
Dad were sitting there seething, eating sandwiches next to their emptied soup
bowls. “Brent called,” muttered Mom, pointing to the Post-it on the fridge.
“Said he wants to speak to you right away.” I grabbed the message and went up to
my room and dialled.

“I nipped it in the bud,” said Brent. “Someone put the cock-measuring story
from the newspaper on the bulletin board in the gym, and a little graffiti
contest took place.”

“Like what?”

“Stuff like, ‘No wonder his name is Sharpe, he’s got a needle dick.’ And, ‘Tom
can swim so fast because he’s got nothing dragging him back.’ That sort of a
thing. Real clever stuff. I only called before someone else told you and blew it
out of proportion. How’s it going in court?”

“Great. Great.”

“Don’t let it get to you.” Brent sounded as if he was encouraging a player
who’d got a bad call on the ice.

I forced myself back down to the kitchen. My mother was saying to my father,
“Yes, it was stupid, damned stupid. Painting me and you as cowards forced
me
to make Rosie look like a loose cannon capable of accusing anyone,
which of course she probably was. But it only made me side against her.” By way
of response to this, Dad glared at me.

“These things get out of hand,” I said, “when you have two
lawyers willing to do anything to win their case.”

“I can’t believe Rosie would allow that to happen after all we’ve tried to do
for her,” said Mom. “She only cut off her nose to spite her face.”

“She didn’t expect the questions you were asked.” When Mom glanced at me
skeptically, I added, “Or the answers you gave, probably.”

“The answers I gave?” she whispered. Then she shouted to the kitchen at large,
“The answers I gave! I only gave those goddamn answers because her lawyer asked
those goddamn questions.”

“Barrett is not her lawyer, Mom, she’s the Crown prosecutor representing the
whole of society.”

Mom responded to that argument with, “Oh, for the love of bloody Jesus
goddamned Christ!”

“Tom?” asked my father in a reasonable tone. “Wasn’t there some way you could
have alerted us to the angle Rosie’s lawyer was going to take with your mother
on the stand?”

“I had no idea what angle she was going to take, and even if I did, I couldn’t
violate a confidence by saying anything?”

“You couldn’t what? Violate a confidence? What’s all this about the defence
lawyer saying you were feeding Rosie’s lawyer with ammo you got here at
home?”

“Keep quiet, Joe. I told you that was probably all crap.”

“It
is
all crap,” I shouted. “That lawyer is not on our side. He’s the
enemy in all this.”

“If he’s the enemy, what the Christ is Rosie’s lawyer?”

“Come on, Joe. Leave it alone.”

“Come on, leave it alone?” said Dad. He rose from the table and snarled, “Like
hell I’ll leave it alone! Making us look like yellow curs who would throw a
little girl to the wolves to save our own cowardly hides from a little hint of
scandal!” He began to pace the kitchen floor. “Or maybe we were afraid of what
an investigation might turn up about
us
. I can hear the tongues wagging
now. It casts us in a beautiful light, doesn’t it?”

I sat there muted momentarily by my father’s wrong-headed rant, staring at him
in disbelief. “What are you saying all this for?” I asked. “I had nothing to do
with what you did or didn’t do years ago or the questions being asked about it
in court now.”