Kathy gave him a careful look. “Are you trying to defend your father?”
“I guess it helps me if I try to understand his side of things, why he thinks the way he does.”
She walked across the room and opened a door. John assumed it led to the bathroom, but he could see now that it was a walk-in closet lined with three filing cabinets. Spiral notebooks, probably fifty in all, were stacked in neat piles on top of each one.
“These are all your court transcripts from your preliminary hearing, to the change of venue denial, to the last appeal.” She had pointed to different drawers as she said this. “This is your medical stuff.” She rested her hand on the top drawer of the cabinet nearest John. “Your first overdose in the ER, your admit after they arrested you, and…” Her mouth opened, but she had stopped. She still looked him in the eye, though. “Information from the Coastal infirmary.”
John swallowed. Zebra. They knew about Zebra.
“This is mostly parole board reports,” Kathy said, opening a drawer that contained six or seven thick files. “Joyce got the copy of your last one about a month ago.”
“Why?” John said, thinking about the volumes of files Joyce had kept for over twenty years. “Why would she have this?”
“It was your mother’s,” Kathy told him. “These notebooks.” She took one off the pile. “These are all her notes. She knew your case backward and forward.”
John opened the notebook, stared at his mother’s neat cursive without really seeing it. When Emily was growing up, penmanship had mattered. Her writing was beautiful, flowing across the page like perfect flowers.
The words, however, weren’t so pretty.
Speedball = heroin + cocaine + ??? Why the bradycardia? Why the apnea? John turned the page. Bite marks around breasts match dental impressions? And, No semen recovered. Where is condom???
Kathy said, “She was trying to get the physical evidence from the county at the end.”
“Why?”
“She wanted to do a DNA test on the knife to prove that it was her blood, but the sample was so small they could only do a mitochondrial panel.” When he shook his head, Kathy explained, “Mitochondrial DNA comes from the mother, so even if it was Emily’s blood, there’s no way to rule out that it couldn’t be yours, too. Or Joyce’s for that matter, but that still wouldn’t have helped the case.”
“ ‘Bite marks’?” he read.
“She thought they could show your teeth didn’t match the bite marks, but there was a case, a Supreme Court case, where bite-mark evidence was ruled inadmissible.” She added, “But she thought that might help with the…the severing.”
“What?”
“The state’s odontologist was never called to the stand. About three years before she died, Emily petitioned for all your evidence, all the files. She was determined to start over, see if she missed anything. She found a report where the state’s dental expert said that he thought the tongue was…that it was bitten off, not cut off.”
“Bitten off?” John echoed. His mind flashed on Cynthia Barrett, the sickening slickness of her tongue when he’d gripped it between his thumb and forefinger. Cutting was hard enough, but biting? What kind of monster bit off a girl’s tongue?
“John?”
He cleared his throat, made himself speak. “The knife was their key piece of evidence. They had an expert who said it was used to cut out her tongue. It proved premeditation.”
“Right. Emily was going for prosecutorial misconduct. They claim they handed over the doctor’s report about the bite to Lydia during pretrial discovery, but Emily couldn’t find any record of it. It could have been grounds for an appeal.”
He fanned through the pages, looked at the dates. “Mom was working on this when she was sick.”
“She couldn’t stop,” Kathy told him. “She wanted to get you out.”
He couldn’t get over the volume of notes she had taken. Pages and pages filled with all sorts of horrible details his mother should have never even heard about. For the second time that day, he was crying in front of his sister’s lover. “Why?” he asked. “Why did she do this? The appeals were over.”
“There was still a slim chance,” Kathy answered. “She didn’t want to give that up.”
“She was too sick,” he said, flipping to the back of the notebook, seeing that the last entry was a week before she went into the hospital for the last time. “She shouldn’t have been doing this. She should’ve been focusing on getting stronger, getting better.”
“Emily knew she wasn’t going to get better,” Kathy told him. “She spent the last days of her life doing exactly what she wanted to do.”
He was really crying now—big, fat tears as he thought about his mother poring over all this information every night, trying to find something, anything, that would get him out.
“She never told me,” John said. “She never told me she was doing this.”
“She didn’t want to get your hopes up,” Joyce said.
He swung around, wondering how long his sister had been standing behind him.
Joyce didn’t look angry when she said, “Kathy, what are you doing?”
“Interfering,” the other woman answered, smiling the way someone smiles when they’ve done something wrong but they know you’ll forgive them.
Kathy said, “I’ll leave you two alone.” She squeezed Joyce’s hand as she walked past her, then pulled the door closed.
John was still holding the notebook, Emily’s life’s work. “Your office is nice,” he said. “And Kathy…”
“How about that?” she said, wryly. “A bona fide homo in the Shelley clan.”
“I bet Dad was proud.”
She snorted a laugh. “Yeah. So happy that he changed his will.”
John clenched his jaw. He didn’t know what he was supposed to say.
“Mama made me promise not to throw those out,” Joyce told him, waving her hand toward the closet. “I wanted to. I wanted to dump them all out in the yard and have a big bonfire. I almost did.” She gave a humorless bark of a laugh, as if she was still surprised she hadn’t torched everything. “I should have. I should have at least put them in a storage place or buried them somewhere.” She let out a heavy sigh. “But I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s her. All of those files, all of those stupid notebooks. Did you know she never went anywhere without one?” Joyce added wryly, “Of course you didn’t. She never took them inside when she visited you, but she worked on them, thought about them, the whole way down and the whole way back. Sometimes she’d call me in the middle of the night and ask me to look into some obscure law she found, something she thought might wrangle a new trial for you.” Joyce looked back at the filing cabinets, the notebooks. “It’s like they’re tiny little pieces of her heart, her soul, and if I throw them out now, then I’m throwing her out, too.”
John smoothed his hand along the cover of the notebook. His mother had given her life to him, dedicated her every waking moment to getting him out of Coastal.