Chapter 90: Saturday
I told him in a park because a park has no door. That was deliberate. If it went badly I wanted him to be able to walk in any direction, and I wanted witnesses at a distance who could not hear.
There were two women with a dog and a man doing something to a bicycle.
I put the blue folder on the bench between us and I did not open it.
“Her name is Bree Halloway,” I said. “She's my cousin. She was twenty-one. She's five feet two.”
Theo did not move for about four seconds. Then he said, “The one in the car.”
“Yes.”
“With your sticker on the back window.”
“Yes.”
“And your bangle.”
“Yes.”
He stood up and walked eleven or twelve steps away and came back and sat down again. I have seen men in visiting rooms do that.
“Say the rest,” he said.
So I said the rest, in order, the way Sirko had done it for me. Bree failed her road test twice. She had no licence on the ninth of March.
Dean drank on Fridays. He had two prior stops in two years, both without charges, because the second one he talked his way out of.
If Dean had been driving drunk with a licence and priors, he was looking at eight to fifteen. If Bree had been driving unlicensed and drunk at twenty-one, she was looking at the same thing, and she was somebody's daughter, and I was not.
“So he put her in the passenger seat,” Theo said.
“The passenger belt was unbuckled at impact. Somebody was in that seat and had not fastened it. That's consistent with a person who has been moved and is not thinking.”
“You don't know that.”
“I don't know it. It's consistent with it. Those are different words and I'm going to keep using the right one.”
He put his head in his hands. “And then you signed.”
“And then I signed,” I said. “Two days before, apparently. Which now makes a different kind of sense than it did.”
“What kind.”
“The kind where somebody had a plan before there was a crash to have a plan about.”
I want to be honest about the next part, because it is the part I got wrong. I said that sentence, about the date, in the flat voice, as one more item on the list.
I should have stopped after Bree. I gave him two impossible things in one afternoon, on a park bench, because I was being thorough.
Theo stood up. “We go to the DA on Monday,” he said.
“No.”
“Cass, I'm the victim. I'm the one they have to see. I walk in there and I put that folder down—”
“And a woman in that office calls the trial prosecutor, who is now a supervisor, and asks about a six-year-old case she won with a signed confession.”
“So?”
“So the first thing that happens is not an investigation,” I said. “The first thing that happens is that four people find out.”
“Then let them find out.”
“Theo.”
“No, let them,” he said, and he was loud now, and the two women with the dog looked over. “Let her sit up at night. She's had six years of sleeping.”
“And the morning after she finds out, she gets a lawyer,” I said. “And the lawyer tells her to say nothing forever. And nothing ever moves again, because the only two people who can move it are a felon and a boy, and we'll have spent our one advantage, which is that right now they think they got away with it.”
“That's not an advantage. That's just them getting away with it.”
“For a while longer. Yes.”
“How long.”
“A year,” I said. “Maybe two.”
He looked at me like I had said something obscene, and I understand why.
“My mother's been dead six years,” he said. “You want two more.”
“I want it done once.”
“You want it done safe.”
“Yes,” I said. “Because I did it the fast way once, in a hospital corridor with a pen somebody handed me. It took six years off me. I am not doing anything fast again as long as I live.”
He picked up the folder.
For two seconds I thought he was going to take it, and I thought about what I would do, and the answer was nothing, because it was his mother.
He put it back down.
“You don't get to decide alone,” he said.
“No.”
“Then we set a date.”
“All right.”
“One year,” he said. “One year from today. If you don't have a lawyer who has read that folder by then, I take it to a reporter and I don't ask you.”
I said, “That's fair.”
“I'm not being fair,” he said. “I'm being finished.”
Then he walked to the path and stopped and came back one more time.
“Cass. Did you like her?”
I said, “I taught her to drive.”