She put the truck in gear and drove away from the parking lot, trying not to think about how ugly and angry Steve had looked just then. He really did hate Richie — had hated him ever since that day on the playground when Susan had confided she loved Richie — and she feared that someday he’d make good on his threat.
Someday he might really kill Richie.
3
Helen realized that this was all pretty crazy, the disguise and-sneaking up to the back of the house and everything, but right now she didn’t have a hell of a lot of choice.
Not after what she’d learned last night, she didn’t.
Brilliant white sheets hung on the clothesline, the soft breeze carrying the smell of fresh laundry and reminding Helen of her girlhood.
She moved quickly, without looking around. She wanted to appear, to anybody who might be watching, as if she had legitimate business here.
She took out her handful of burglary tools and went to work.
4
The courthouse had been built during the worst of the depression years, back when the WPA was putting men to work. With its Grecian columns, majestic roof, and long, leaded windows, the courthouse had always been a hallowed place for Amy. Even as a little girl, she’d liked to come down here and walk around the marble halls, and glimpse the judges in their black robes. Even today, the courthouse was a special place for her, and sometimes in the middle of a trial she’d look around, and feel stunned to realize that the little girl had grown up to spend so many hours here.
Amy heard the echoes of her own footsteps as she hurried to the door reading Courtroom C.
The courtroom was formal and old-fashioned, with a wooden railing separating the public benches from the lawyers and the judge. At key spots on the walls hung reverential paintings of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR. Any president more current was bound to offend somebody. In a Republican district like this one, even the FDR portrait was probably pushing things.
The Sampson Food lawyers, two men and a woman, were already at their table, nervously fidgeting through their papers in an effort to look perfectly calm and self-confident. They all wore blue suits.
The jury was just now filing in. They were average people with a median age of around thirty-five or so. There was one black woman and one Hispanic man. Amy had fought hard to get them on the jury. They lived in the areas most affected by the Sampson landfills.
Just as Amy reached her desk, the bailiff, a white-haired man, walked out of the judges chambers to the left and said, “Please rise, court is in session, the Honorable Douglas D. Hawthorne presiding.”
Judge Hawthorne, a tall man with stooped shoulders and an eaglelike face, was the most prosaic of all the local judges. Strictly no-nonsense. He hated fireworks of all kinds, yours or his. The lawyer who took to playing Hamlet soon found himself appearing before a very unsympathetic judge.
Judge Hawthorne seated himself, looked around, banged his gavel on his massive and looming bench, and then said, “The jury has reached a verdict?”
“Yes, we have, Your Honor,” said a fiftyish woman in a dark suit too heavy for this time of year.
The woman nodded, stood up, and glanced briefly at the single piece of paper in her hand.
The issue was quite simple, as Amy saw it, and had presented it.
In the course of the trial Amy had demonstrated that Sampson needed to be using dry landfills rather than wet ones. Wet landfills had a tendency to build up hazardous methane gas. Wet landfills also allowed large amounts of contaminated groundwater to leach into surrounding land. Amy supported these contentions with studies the state university had done on the health trends in the neighborhoods nearest the landfills.
Sampson had retaliated both in and out of court. The lawyers brought in paid experts who challenged all the scientific arguments in her case. They were better than average for paid experts. They might be able to persuade the jury with their humility and sincerity.
Outside of court, Sampson had used its own workers to spread the message that the expense of switching to dry landfills would cost money, and thus ultimately cost jobs. Amy didn’t blame the workers for fighting her lawsuit. But she did blame Sampson management for lying to and exploiting their workers this way. Sampson could easily afford to switch to dry landfills. They could amortize the cost over four or five years and the cost would be negligible. And there was no reason that anybody would have to be let go. Amy had done her arithmetic carefully in advance.
Judge Hawthorne, glancing at his watch, which was something he often did, as if he had an important appointment somewhere else, said, “The jury foreman will please read the court the verdict.”
5
As Helen discovered, the home was as beautiful inside as it was outside.
Many of the accoutrements she loved so much about Victoriana were here, and done in admirable taste — everything from shadow boxes to shellwork, from beaded pillows to flowers under glass, from Tiffany lamps to the white lacquered fireplace mantel. As she walked around the house, she could almost imagine H. G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle sipping sherry in the parlor.
She was very nervous for the first few minutes. After all, burglary wasn’t exactly her calling in life.
Every time she heard a passing car on the street outside, her heartbeat increased perceptibly. She was even startled by a helicopter overhead, and wondered for a terrible moment if Chief Sam Bowers had somehow figured that she was in here.
Gradually, she calmed down.
There was nothing to worry about, really. Darcy was attending high school all day and Darcy’s parents, the Crystal Falls version of the Beautiful People or whatever they were being called this year, were spending a month in Paris. The dears.
They were such pretentious people — they’d let everybody in Crystal Falls know that they would be here only as long as it took Dick to troubleshoot the factory back into prosperity. She still remembered the day that Dick Fuller’s name appeared in Fortune. Every time Debbie Fuller mentioned the article, which was about every thirty seconds, she would patiently explain to the new listener exactly what Fortune magazine was, as if people in Crystal Falls had never heard of it.
Dick and Debbie Fuller were from Manhattan and devoutly believed that unless you lived on that hallowed isle you did not know anything about anything.
Helen wondered if they knew about their fifteen-year-old daughter Darcy.
Maybe they not only knew but approved...
Somehow that wouldn’t surprise her...
She stood at the bottom of the long staircase that swept on up to the sunny second floor. She really couldn’t get over all the details of this place... corner scroll brackets, balusters, corbels, spandrels, ceiling medallions...
It really was like being marooned in a different time... one far more elegant than modern times...
Helen sighed deeply and then climbed the stairs to the second floor.
If she’d been too nervous before, she was now too leisurely. She had to push herself to move faster. Quit being a sightseer.
In and out.
That’s how she had to handle this.
In and out.
And that’s exactly what had brought her here, too, the old in-and-out, as the pornographers called it.
Helen got to work.
6
“We find the defendant guilty on four of the six counts, Your Honor,” the jury forewoman said, and then began reading the guilty charges one by one.