Amy allowed herself a moment of ridiculous glee. Amy McGuire, district attorney. It was like a corny TV show that played in her head sometimes. Charlie’s Angels updated with herself as the new Farrah. Embarrassing, was what it was.
The fantasy didn’t last long. Reality punched the off button on her little fantasy.
Even though she’d won all the most important charges, there was going to be an appeal. And the way the appeals courts had been behaving lately, you never knew how you were going to end up. In the meantime, of course, the people living around the wet landfills, the children especially, would keep right on getting sick. And Sampson Foods would continue to arrogantly do exactly what it wanted with its waste material.
She listened as the jury forewoman finished reading the verdict to the bench. Maybe it hadn’t been an overwhelming victory but it at least said something about the community she lived in. The people here weren’t going to be cowed by cynical threats from businesses long accustomed to doing just what they wanted.
After the foreman was finished, the judge had his say, thanking the lawyers for comporting themselves well in his court, and then thanking the jury members for their patience and their wisdom.
When Hawthorne returned to his chambers, Amy started neatly filling her briefcase with her papers. Ordinarily, she would have been accompanied by at least one other person from the office, but today everybody else was busy.
She was just turning to the back of the courtroom when she saw Sam Bowers standing there.
Or thought she did.
The man in the dark suit was about Sam’s height and weight, and his face was tanned just about the same color as Sam’s, but on closer inspection his face was haggard and his movements were jerky, without Sam’s natural grace and composure.
She wished she hadn’t seen Sam this morning.
For the past several months, she had managed to avoid him completely, which was no small feat given the fact that as Crystal Falls’ two most important law officials, they should have been thrown together a great deal.
Damn Sam, anyway.
He was every bit as stubborn as she was, and that made for some real problems when you were trying to have a love affair.
7
Helen was tempted to stop in the master bedroom — she would like to have found something that would directly discredit the parents, but suddenly she was aware of time passing. She must have already been inside here, what? Ten minutes? Fifteen? Had to hurry...
Darcy’s bedroom was the only place in the house that didn’t continue the Victorian motif.
It was done in modern pinks — pink the walls, pink the curtains, pink the bedspread, pink the canopy bed, pink (for God’s sake) the rug — and the walls were littered with magazine pages depicting a variety of “grunge” rockers. Helen was familiar with the term because she’d read about them recently in Newsweek. Most of them were junkies, few of them bathed often, and a number of them had killed themselves. Rock music had come a long way since the days of Frankie Avalon and Connie Francis...
She set about searching...
Three minutes later, she found condoms and the slit-crotch panties in the top drawer. Darcy was a lot older than her calendar age of fifteen. Then she found the dildo.
She didn’t touch it. Was actually afraid to touch it. So sleek. So ominous. Just sitting there.
Like a dog that might leap at her at any moment.
The whole thought of something like this being inside her, well — she shuddered.
She spent the next five minutes going through all of Darcy’s bureau drawers. And then she moved on to the closet.
Darcy must have had enough clothes to dress her entire class at school. Fashionable, expensive, brand-name things, too, no doubt thanks to all those trips that her parents were always taking to San Francisco and London and New York, trips they never tired of recounting when they sat at the country club and held court.
There was an old saying in Congress, “An expert is somebody who lives fifty miles away and has a slide show.”
At the Crystal Falls Country Club, the same rationale applied. A sophisticated person was somebody who’d been to New York twice and lived to tell about it.
She wondered again if they knew what their daughter was up to...
For in her search, not only did Helen turn up K-Y jelly in the large economy size, she also found three pairs of crotchless panties, two bras with the nipple areas cut out, three vibrators, some kind of penis cream called Hard Times, and a variety of Polaroids showing Darcy in a variety of poses, all naked, all disgusting.
Helen felt the same way about the Polaroids she’d felt about the dildo.
Did not want to touch them.
Up in the far corner of the closet, she found the shoe box with more photos.
The youngest man in any of the Polaroids looked to be thirty-five or so.
Not a single high-school boy in the bunch.
Some of them Helen recognized, of course.
The assistant principal at the grade school. The owner of the Lincoln dealership. There was even a woman, the wife of the local Baptist minister.
Each and every one of them photographed with his or her very favorite sex toy, fifteen-year-old Darcy.
There seemed to be a photo of practically everybody in town — but not the person’s photo she was looking for.
That was when the door opened downstairs.
“Shit,” Helen whispered to herself. “Shit.”
She froze, listening.
A woman. Singing. In Spanish.
And then the situation came very clear — Helen had carefully checked out the parents and the daughter.
What she hadn’t checked out was the cleaning woman, probably an illegal.
Even though the golden couple was in France, the house still needed to be cleaned.
And so the cleaning woman was here.
Now what the hell was she going to do?
What if the cleaning woman came marching up here and found Helen in Darcy’s bedroom?
How could Helen ever explain that?
Oh, this had been a very, very stupid idea.
The woman continued to hum as she moved around on the ground floor of the venerable Victorian.
In the living room, she turned on MTV. Rap music — coarse, vulgar, and threatening — boomed into life.
Helen tiptoed over to the window, pulled back the sheer pink curtains, and gazed down at the ground.
In the movies it was always so easy, climbing out of a second-story bedroom window.
The reality was quite different.
If she tried to climb out this window, she’d break her neck.
So now just what the hell was she going to do?
Three
1
Lunch was a tuna sandwich with chips and a diet Coke.
Amy made a deal with herself.
She counted the chips. There were ten of them. And a pickle.
The pickle she didn’t care about.
The temptation lay in the chips. Hadn’t her bathroom scale read two pounds heavier this morning? Didn’t all the women in her family start to put on serious weight when they reached her age?
She’d eat three.
That was a sensible compromise, wasn’t it?
But after she’d eaten the third one, and after trying to fill herself up with the diet Coke, she glanced around the restaurant and then looked guiltily, and with great lust, at the fourth potato chip.
She had a beautiful rationalization.
How many times in her tenure as DA was she going to win a case as important as the Sampson case?