Triptych

Joyce’s office was nice, exactly as John would have imagined if he let himself think about his sister and her life outside of him. The Persian carpet on the floor had deep blues and burgundies and the curtains were a thin linen that let in the sunlight. The paint on the wall was a kind of chocolate beige. The colors were masculine, but there was something really feminine to the way Joyce had used them. Or maybe a designer had done the office, some pricey chick from Buckhead who got paid to spend rich people’s money. There were a couple of Oriental-looking paintings that weren’t to John’s taste, but the pictures on the credenza under the windows made his heart hurt in his chest.

A young Joyce and John on the log ride at Six Flags. Baby John in Richard’s lap as he gave him a bottle. Ten-year-old Joyce on the beach in her two-piece bathing suit, a Popsicle in each hand. There were more recent photographs, too. Kathy and Joyce at the zoo. Kathy on a horse with a mountain view behind her. Two Labrador retrievers rolling around on the grass.

The photo that stopped him was of his mother. Emily with a scarf around her head, her eyes sunken, cheeks hollow. She was smiling, though. His mother had always had the most beautiful smile. John had gotten through so many nights thinking about that smile, the easy way she bestowed it, the genuine kindness behind it. Tears fell from his eyes at the sight of her, and he felt a physical ache knowing he would never see her again.

Kathy said, “Emily was a wonderful person.”

John made himself put the frame back where it belonged. He used the back of his hand to wipe his eyes. “You knew her?”

“Yes,” Kathy said. “She was very close to Joyce. It was hard on all of us when she got sick.”

“I don’t…” John didn’t know how to say this. “I don’t remember seeing you at the funeral.”

“I was there,” she said, and he saw tension around her eyes. “Your father isn’t very accepting of Joyce’s relationship with me.”

“No,” John said. “He wouldn’t be.” Richard had always been certain that he knew the difference between right and wrong, good and bad. Whoever crossed that line was as easily cut out of his life as the cancerous tumors he removed in the operating room.

John felt the need to say, “I’m sorry about that. He’s always loved Joyce.”

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 mitochondria! 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 pre-trial discovery, but Emily couldn’t find any record of it. It could have been grounds for an appeal.”

He fa

“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.”