Текст книги "Equal Access"

Автор книги: A. E. Branson

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

“I have to if I can.”

“Why?”

How was he going to explain the most complex case he’d yet handled in Shad’s three years of being an attorney to a mere child? “Because the law says that everything will go to your dad when your mom passes away. Including you. Normally that’s not a problem. But....” Shad shook his head as he took another deep breath for a long exhale. “I have to take appropriate measures to insure your rights are protected.”

Charissa looked up at him with a slight frown, and Shad realized he’d just spoken above the girl’s comprehension. Shad also quickly ascertained why he had just made that slip. The child’s relatives had mentioned to him, as though it were a positive thing, that Charissa acted older than other children her age. While her pseudo-maturity was easier to handle than hyperactivity, Shad knew both could be symptoms of abuse.

That gut feeling which usually eluded him during most of his interaction with others never failed Shad when he suspected any kind of abuse. He could only figure it was the result of a well-worn survival instinct, and feeling it stir again increased his concern for Charissa.

The girl had been served an awful lot. Her mother was dying. Her father was verbally and emotionally abusive. The only relative who could, or would, take her in was Monica Simms’s brother Eliot and his wife Tess. Although they seemed like kind people, Monica had informed Shad that Eliot was much like their father. On the positive side he was a good worker and provider, but Eliot also wound up not being home a lot. Tess was also devoted to her own job with the Department of Natural Resources. Shad wasn’t completely content with the prospect of placing Charissa in a home where she might feel second to her adoptive parents’ jobs, but it was better than being belittled, berated and bullied throughout her childhood.

“I’m here to protect you.” A flicker of an idea surfaced in his mind. “All of us, your mom, Uncle Eliot, Aunt Tess, we all want to do what’s best for you. You’re very important to all of us. And anytime you want to talk to me, I want to listen. I’m your lawyer, really. Your mom hired me to protect you, and that’s exactly what I’m gonna do.”

Charissa looked up and studied him for a few seconds before speaking. “You’re my lawyer?”

“That’s right.”

“Does that mean you have to do what I say?”

“If I agree it’s in your best interests.”

“Will you stop the divorce?”

Shad shook his head again. “I’m sorry. Stopping the divorce is not in your best interests.”

Charissa frowned as several more seconds passed. Then her expression became more thoughtful.

“So I could fire you if I wanted?”

Shad was as impressed as he was taken aback. For a girl who was just going to be starting kindergarten at summer’s end, Charissa was developing keen problem solving skills.

Of course that could also be an indication she had too much practice at being thrust into problems children shouldn’t have to handle.

Shad hated to just tell Charissa no. He was too familiar with the powerlessness of childhood, and Charissa would be overwhelmed if she truly knew how many powers were pulling at her now. He also didn’t want to mislead her with a yes. This was one of those times he had to find a compromise.

“Only if you give me two weeks notice.”

“What’s that?”

“That means if you fire me, you’re still stuck with me for two more weeks.”

Charissa thought about his explanation before reaching her conclusion. “I guess I’d better fire you now, then.”

Well, this wasn’t the first time an idea he’d thought was reasonably bright turned out to be more dim witted. “Already? You haven’t even given me the chance to prove my worth to you.”

“No chance.” Charissa shook her head. “I want to get it over with.”

Shad studied her as Charissa actually looked over toward the swing set. His gut stirred again. Why? What was it about that choice of words she’d just spoken that he recognized yet couldn’t name? The combination of personal experience and formal training enabled Shad to comprehend the subtleties in all levels of abuse. It was the one aspect of human behavior he had a good grasp on.

Yet those words “get it over with” reverberated in Shad’s memory. Charissa wanted to “get rid” of him, and do so quickly. That was understandable. He was, after all, the big, bad lawyer who was apparently tearing her family apart before its appointed time. But his gut told him there was more. As much as Shad knew, he realized he only knew just enough to suspect he was missing something.

“Will you push me?” Charissa glanced back toward him.

Shad immediately processed her question beyond its face value because he suspected that he was going to have to dig for more than just testimony. But right now his analytical side needed to take a break. It had a way of overshadowing his social obligations, and Shad knew in order to satisfy it, he was going to have to build a rapport with the girl first. His response, however, was still grounded in the underlying complexities of her question.

“Only as much as you need me to.”

Chapter Two

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people.

–Carl Jung

The train station was an easy walk from the park, but Friday afternoons there could be busy, especially in a suburb of St. Louis. Shad didn’t like crowds, but taking the train was infinitely preferable to the alternative of driving for two hours back to Jefferson City. Not only would he and Charissa have the freedom to move around instead of being trapped in a car together, Shad could avoid stressing out over a commonplace activity most people took for granted.

He could operate a combine in an open field of corn, soybeans, or oats with confident ease. Shad could also drive a car on back country roads in relaxed comfort. Traffic in the town of Linn where his office was located could start making him jittery, but the traffic in Jefferson City would almost bring him to his breaking point. Thus there was no way on Earth Shad would even consider trying to negotiate with what seemed like millions of vehicles on the unfamiliar streets or highways of St. Louis. His aversion to crowds in general convinced Shad he was mildly agoraphobic, but the throng at the train station was a lesser evil to him than traffic on the streets.

The train also provided the appeal of granting Charissa a request she’d had for at least the last couple of years. Like most kids she harbored a desire to ride every mode of locomotion available to her, and trains were high on her list. The schedule was accommodating to what Shad needed to accomplish today’s task. Only Eliot Weller’s last minute failure to accompany him had been a drawback.

Charissa took a window seat when they boarded the train, and shortly afterward the diesel engine pulled them away from the station. By the time Shad presented their tickets to the conductor she was ready to explore beyond the scenery that flashed by the window, so he took Charissa to the café car where she could enjoy a bag of pretzels and some apple juice while sitting at one of the tables.

Soon after they sat, Shad noticed that the landscape zipping by their window was suddenly closing in as though the hillside were trying to engulf them.

“We’re coming to a tunnel,” he commented.

“Where?” Even as Charissa turned toward the window the car suddenly became darker. At the same instant her hand knocked against her plastic bottle of juice, tumbling it to its side.

Shad snatched the bottle and set it upright, but since it was nearly full about a fourth of its contents had spilled on the table. He plucked a few napkins from the dispenser under the window and mopped up the juice. As he reached for a couple more napkins to wipe the area dry, Shad noticed that Charissa’s attention was focused on him instead of the dark window. Her eyes were a bit wide again.

“No harm done.” Shad smiled even though there was a slight tremor in his gut. “You’ve still got most of your juice. I’ll throw these away and be right back.”

The train car brightened again as he rose from his seat to walk toward the trash can. As Shad dropped the wet napkins into the container a memory from his early childhood suddenly burst into his conscious thinking.

The event seemed to screen itself in his mind at supersonic speed, yet it left out no detail. Shad could see the clear glass of water that his elbow accidentally struck. Shards and droplets burst in every direction as it crashed to the kitchenette floor. Shad didn’t believe the last flying fragment had yet been overcome by gravity when the boyfriend of that woman who gave birth to Shad swore vehemently and grabbed Shad by the neck to slam the child down on the wet and littered linoleum. Pain shot through Shad’s head as it collided with the surface, momentarily dulling the bite of a glass sliver that pierced his upper arm.

He banished the memory before it could continue. Although Shad couldn’t control when those images surfaced in his mind, it was his decision whether or not to linger on them. And since he didn’t like to remember those episodes, he never lingered. His full attention belonged to the present, and Shad turned away from the trash can to return to the table where Charissa sat.

She was still staring at him as Shad seated himself across the table from her.

“Did you see the tunnel?” He asked. “Or was it too dark to see anything?”

It took her a few seconds to reply. “I ... didn’t see it.” Her tone was low and soft.

Shad suspected it was distraction, not darkness, which impeded Charissa’s experience. “Well, don’t worry. We’ll go through another tunnel before we get to Jeff. In fact it should come up in just a couple of minutes. How’re your pretzels? Crunchy?”

Charissa nodded, her eyes less wide but still regarding him cautiously.

“How’s your juice? Crunchy?”

Her brow furrowed slightly but her lips twisted upward a little. “Of course not.”

“Chewy?”

“No.”

“Oh, then it must be fuzzy.”

Charissa finally cracked a small grin. “Juice isn’t fuzzy.”

“I’ve seen fuzzy juice.” Shad rested his arms on the table and leaned forward slightly. “Of course it hadn’t been in the refrigerator for a few days.”

The rest of snack time proceeded smoothly, and when they returned to their seats in the passenger car Charissa was ready to look through the items in her day pack. At first she commented on the toys and booklets to Shad, but then became more involved playing with a cloth doll and a stuffed penguin. Shad initially paid attention to the antics she acted out with her toys in case she revealed something about her family life, but when it became obvious Charissa had the doll and bird staged as friends who got along splendidly, he decided to read the newspaper he’d bought earlier that day.

Shad had purchased the paper with the intention of looking through it while he waited for Charissa to be brought to him at the park. But Shad had been too uptight to follow through with that plan, so he was glad to have the chance to look through it at all. He wasn’t particularly interested in St. Louis news, but interest had little to do with Shad’s perusal of the written word. Reading had once been a form of escape for him. And although Shad no longer needed to escape, he was still a compulsive reader.

He skimmed over the usual doom and gloom of the national and local news, and even more quickly flipped through the business section since he doubted there would be any articles of relevance there. Just as Shad started to scan as quickly through the sports section he suddenly hesitated.

His memory stirred. It beckoned him to return to the business section and take a closer look at the photographs.

Shad turned carefully through the pages in reverse order. He looked closely at each picture until one near the bottom of a middle page caused a ripple in his memory again.

There were two men in the snapshot. They were standing on either side of one of those old fashioned arcade-style video games, leaning toward each other and smiling at the camera. The man on the right was a middle-aged fellow that Shad didn’t recognize, but the man on the left....

His memory was a funny thing. Shad could recall names almost reflexively, but assigning them to faces was another matter. Whenever he initially met people Shad always had trouble remembering what they looked like, and all the mnemonic devices he tried didn’t help much. But once Shad actually got to know people, their faces were forever etched in his mind. The man on the left looked like he might be a little younger than his partner. His appearance was distinguished with blonde hair trimmed quite short and a generally athletic build except for a bit of a bulge in the belly. But his eyes, his nose, his mouth, the shape of his face....

Not even the passage of over twenty years had changed those features on this person.

A dull tingle began creeping through Shad as he turned his attention to the accompanying article. It discussed how a once local computer game business had evolved into a successful St. Louis chain of technology stores. Now the stores were going to begin popping up all over the state. One of the two original founders was the man pictured on the left, and his name was Walden Palmer.

Walden Palmer ... Walden ... Walden...

...Wally.

Complete numbness settled over Shad as he stared at the man in the photograph. It had probably been around seven years since he’d even bothered to think about Wally. Even whenever he had to consider the subject of child molestation, Shad managed to not recall those three youthful years Wally “took care” of him.

Now, over the next couple of minutes, memories flooded into and flashed through his mind like images from a very disjointed dream. Then Shad caught himself and with a little more effort than usual banished those recollections.

A sort of eerie sickness crept through him, the sensation one felt when he knew trouble was about to land on him with both feet and there was no way to escape. Shad focused all his cogitation on the present. But contemplating the present was no better than remembering the past.

The man he’d always known only as Wally was still loose in the public and still living in St. Louis and was currently a successful chain store owner. How many young boys frequented that business? How many were granted special favors around the premises in exchange for “special favors” in private with Wally?

How many boys had been subject to Wally’s attention over the past twenty years?

A wave of guilt washed through Shad. It was true that nearly ten years ago, after he turned eighteen, Shad tried to track down Wally. He had even gone so far as to make contact with that woman who gave birth to him. The only information Shad had on Wally was the mere nickname, and he'd hoped that woman would be able to provide him with more clues. But all she could – or would – tell him about Wally was about how self-centered the man was, which sounded to Shad like a serious episode of projection. After she changed the subject to monopolize the conversation about how Shad shouldn’t be wasting his money and other people’s time to go to college, he was glad to end the only meeting he’d had with that woman ever since the Delaneys brought him into their home.

With the miserable failure of that attempt, Shad had given up trying to find Wally. He counseled himself with the hope that even though Shad would be unable to turn Wally in for prosecution, perhaps somebody else would.

Except now he could make up for his earlier failure – no, wait, he couldn’t. Over a couple of months ago, when Shad turned twenty-eight, the statute of limitations ran out for him to file criminal charges against Wally. A surge of guilt pulsed through him again.

He should have kept trying to locate Wally. Over the past several years, in connection with his work and his proficiency with computers, Shad had been able to track down several people with no more than a name and a last known address. It was no excuse that he had even less information about Wally. Shad should have done ... something more.

Then again, Wally wasn’t that bad. Yes, there had been a price for his attention, but of all the boyfriends that lived with Shad and that woman, Wally was the only one who never ignored him or yelled or struck Shad in any way. Shad had been young enough when Wally was living with them he’d come to the conclusion Wally was actually his father. When Wally had been gone for a few days and some other guy moved in with them, Shad had asked that woman where his father was. Once she figured out he was talking about Wally, that woman informed Shad how stupid he was for believing such a thing. For nearly four years after that, Shad occasionally inquired about Wally whenever the boyfriend of the time became especially unbearable. And because of his situation in those days, Shad didn’t even realize that what Wally had done with him was wrong.

When, years later and under the care of Mam and Pap, Shad did learn that such actions were deviant, he didn’t tell them about Wally. He never told them about any of that woman’s boyfriends. Talking about the boyfriends would only make him think about them, and Shad was determined to ignore that part of his past as much as possible. He didn’t even tell them about Brody, the other boyfriend Shad had bothered to track down.

Shad immediately suppressed memories of Brody that started to percolate to the surface of his conscious. Ten years ago he discovered that Brody was already in jail on multiple charges. Shad became determined never to waste even seconds of his life to any thought of Brody again.

With Wally untraceable for him and Brody already incarcerated, Shad had managed to maintain his silence about that dark era of his childhood. There was only one interval of a few months he ever broke it, and that was only with Dulsie. Even then all he mentioned to her was about the other boyfriends, and Shad was relieved that Dulsie didn’t obsess on encouraging him to divulge more. She respected silence. Her father Karl didn’t say much about certain aspects of his own childhood, either, so Dulsie understood such reluctance.

Of course Shad knew how the field of psychology encouraged one to speak up about such issues in order to better grapple with them, but he dismissed it as a generalization that didn’t apply to everybody. What could possibly be healing about burdening the people he cared for with knowledge about something they couldn’t do anything about? He had spoken about a few episodes to Dulsie only because he was courting her at the time and Shad knew he had to show willingness to share himself.

Discovering Wally now could mean Shad might have to break his long-held silence. A sizable part of him wished he’d unpacked his laptop computer and worked on another case or played a few games of solitaire instead of reading this newspaper. If only Shad had wound up throwing that paper away without ever having looked at it.

But there was no such thing as coincidence.

He had to turn Wally in, but how? With the statute of limitations already passed, Shad had little legal recourse. It was true victims had the option until the age of thirty-one to file civil claims in order to recover damages for either physical or psychological injury. But that didn’t do Shad any good.

Wally had never physically hurt him. And despite all the shortcomings that happened in his head, Shad had worked too hard at presenting himself as a relatively balanced individual to claim Wally had caused him psychological harm. There was one problem he used to have that some theorized might be evoked by past episodes of molestation, but Shad didn’t believe that theory and it was no longer a problem for him anyway. Even if it were, he would never divulge it to anyone besides Dulsie. And thanks to the grace of God, he’d never had to tell even her.

Although Shad did suspect it was that very problem that had soured his relationship with Dulsie’s mother, Jill.

The train began slowing for the second time since they’d left St. Louis to come to a stop. Shad found himself snapped back to the present as Charissa scrambled to her knees to better peer out the window.

“Where are we?” Charissa’s nose rubbed on the pane as she turned her head to the left and then the right.

“Hermann. Our next stop will be in Jeff.”

Charissa turned her attention from the broad and shimmering Missouri River on their side to the brick depot on the other side of the car. “Are there any more tunnels?”

“Not on this trip.”

Charissa plopped back down on the seat. “Why do they make tunnels?”

“Sometimes it’s easier to go through the mountain than around it.”

Charissa frowned slightly as she stared at the wide river outside the window. “I don’t see any mountains.”

“Well, today we call them hills.” Shad realized he was grateful for the distraction Charissa was bringing him.

“What happened to the mountains?”

“They’re hills now. In this area they were eroded down from mountains. And before that a lot of this area used to be under water.”

She looked out the window again. “The river was bigger?”

“It wasn’t the river.” Shad bent over to pick up a plastic horse that had fallen to the floor. “It was the ocean.”

Charissa’s face brightened. “The ocean is near here?”

Shad smiled. “Not anymore. Not for a long, long time.” He set the toy back beside her. “It was back around the time of the dinosaurs.”

“Oh.” Charissa looked disappointed. “I wanted to go to the ocean.”

“I’m sure you’ll get to someday.”

“I hope so.” Charissa turned her attention back to the window and her tone became a bit somber. “Maybe if I’m good I’ll get to go to the ocean. I want to go out on a boat.”

His analytical ego shifted back into gear as Shad contemplated her recent remark for a few seconds. Verbal abuse was a foundation for other forms of abuse. Although Monica confirmed that Demetri had never attacked her or Charissa physically, it could sometimes take months or years for abuse to progress to other levels. And Shad’s recent discovery made him contemplate yet another possible violation Demetri could commit against his daughter. Shad took a few more seconds to decide how to word his question.

“What do you have to do to be good?”

Charissa didn’t look at him as she picked up the doll she’d dropped to the seat when the train stopped. “What Dad tells me.” Her earlier enthusiasm had vanished.

“What does your dad tell you to do?”

“To be good.” Charissa looked at Shad a bit earnestly. “Read me a story.”

This had to be payback for all those times Mam and Pap had gently tried to question Shad about his life before he moved in with them, and he always found a way to avoid answering. If only they’d been able to hire a good lawyer, Wally might already be in jail by now. Of course Shad probably wouldn’t be here, then, but rather at a career in computer technology.

That gut feeling haunted him again as Charissa picked up one of the books pulled from the day pack and handed it to him without even looking at which one it was. Her type of case was exactly the sort of situation that made Shad accept the incongruous idea of becoming an attorney. His practice in private and family law usually involved mortgages, property, estates and wills. Shad didn’t handle nearly the number of adoptions he would have preferred, but since becoming a small town attorney in a two-office partnership a year and a half ago, Shad knew that would be the case. Plenty of people came through his door seeking a divorce, but Shad would only take cases that involved protecting the rights of the victimized.

As he accepted the book from Charissa, another memory pushed to the forefront of Shad’s mind. Wally had always been good about reading to him. They used to make trips to the library together and Wally was instrumental not only in teaching Shad how to read but also instilled his love for the written word. Once Wally was gone Shad never got to go to the library anymore. Then Brody moved in four years later. Spurred by memories of the library as being a safe place, Shad began to spend all his free time there in order to keep away from Brody as much as possible. There Erin Delaney noticed the quiet boy who never bothered anything.

Of all the boyfriends that woman had, Wally had been the kindest. But that one component of Wally’s personality made him dangerous. If Shad had been the only boy Wally molested, he’d be more than glad to let the man go. But he had to protect the other boys. He had to stop Wally, but how?

Why did everything always have to be done the hard way?