Текст книги "Equal Access"

Автор книги: A. E. Branson

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

Chapter Four

A man is what he is, not what he used to be.

–Yiddish proverb

Dulsie thought about the future as usual that Saturday morning while she harvested some vegetables from the garden with Shad’s help and the dog’s supervision.

The garden was the only cultivated ground on the little five-acre farm the two of them rented. It was a small plot, not nearly as large as Dulsie planned on tending someday, but this morning she still had a decent harvest of squash, beans, tomatoes and okra. The garden was laid out behind and to the side of the compact, single-story farmhouse they lived in. More directly behind the house was a modest and weathered wood shed where they kept the lawn mower and garden tools. Farther back and to the other side of the home was the gate to the turkey pasture which claimed most of what remained of the land. Since they lived on the backside of the property owner’s farm, there was plenty of other land around them, with the nearest neighbor living half a mile down the road.

With the owner’s permission they improved the fencing around that field when Dulsie and Shad moved in three years ago. Immediately afterward they built a simple shed that was just large enough to house thirty turkeys. Finally Dulsie purchased twenty-five poults and a Great Pyrenees puppy, and began the task of establishing her future heritage turkey farm.

These weren’t the commercial, broad-breasted white turkeys like Dad raised for almost forty years. During her childhood Dulsie wondered where all the turkeys were that looked like the ones decorating the school around Thanksgiving, so she developed a quest to find them. Dulsie received an education on the history of turkey raising and eventually discovered the foundation stock for the commercial birds were the “standard” bronze variety that were more reminiscent of the wild turkeys. This variety had become rare, so Dulsie became part of a group dedicated to preserving the old-fashioned birds. As an added benefit their silly antics amused her, and Dulsie was convinced that turkeys were proof God had a sense of humor.

The numbers fluctuated as surplus toms and cull hens were sold or butchered and more poults hatched in the spring. But Dulsie’s little flock had grown to the size their small acreage could handle. When her parents proposed earlier this year to sell their own farm to Dulsie and Shad next spring, after Mom retired from her job with the electric cooperative, Dulsie was elated.

Dad was sixty-three years old now, and her parents had more stumbled into turkey farming than planned on it. While they were a young couple looking for a farm to buy, an eighty-acre place with four barns and a rather neglected house came up for sale. Since Dad had heard that the only thing dumber than turkeys was the person who raised them, he figured he qualified for the work. Unlike Uncle Pax, who planned on remaining with the family farm until he was either too weak or too muddled to labor in the fields anymore, Dad always planned on retiring while he had many good years left in him. Her parents hoped to buy a nice little house around the nearby old German community of Westphalia.

Since both of Dulsie’s older brothers had relocated into other parts of the state and were leading lives that didn’t involve turkeys – at least not the feathered variety – and Dulsie apparently had succumbed to some kind of genetic defect that caused her to be interested in turkeys, her parents figured she would have use for the farm. When Dad told them a few months ago that by spring next year they’d like to move on, he pointed out that Shad, who had lots of experience in property transfers, could take care of the legal aspects. Shad hemmed and hawed for a few seconds before commenting that Dad was proposing the kind of situation Shad would never advise a client to do: conduct business within the family. Dad laughed and remarked, “That only applies to normal families. We aren’t normal!” Shad got her father’s point and agreed to take care of the paperwork.

Dulsie always appreciated how things had a way of working out for the best. They would be getting a bigger farm where she could really develop her efforts to help preserve a heritage breed. And hopefully soon after she and Shad got settled in they could get started on a family, whereupon Dulsie would leave her job as a financial counselor and devote her time to their home and farm.

Shad’s income in the last year and a half was more modest than it had been during his first year and a half as a staff attorney, but Dulsie had learned thrift at Mom’s knee. She also figured his earnings would go up as Shad became more established, whether in spite of or because of his insistence to keep himself affordable to the middle and lower earning classes. Dad claimed his current farm did only a little better than break even, which was why he did side work as a self-employed handyman and Mom worked in an accounts receivable office. It was hard for a family farm to thrive in these modern times, but it was a lifestyle Dulsie didn’t want to give up.

When she moved into a dorm in Columbia for her freshman year of college, Dulsie quickly confirmed that she didn’t like city life. It was nice that Shad, who’d already completed a couple of years in college and had moved into an apartment in Columbia the previous year, was there to show her around, run errands with her, share rides.... Dulsie had never imagined they would wind up getting married less than two years after that. And to think she once believed there was no way Dulsie would ever get married before actually graduating from college.

It was one of the arguments Mom used when Dulsie and Shad got engaged. Dulsie was too young. And although Dulsie agreed that only twenty years old qualified as young, she wasn’t getting married for the same reasons as many other women who married so youthfully. She wasn’t fleeing a bad home life or seeking someone to help her achieve “independence” from her parents. Dulsie and Shad were both fully aware that “young love” was more like a stream – all bubbly and exciting but lacking in much practical use – while mature love was more like a major river, which might look slow and a bit dull but was the force that contained enduring power. Shad wasn’t trying to rush her into anything and was absolutely determined that Dulsie’s own studies would continue unabated. They shared the same values, and Shad was showing all the qualities of a reliable family man. After all, he had learned to be so at Uncle Pax’s knee. Getting married just before Shad started law school would be both convenient and challenging, although Dulsie now admitted she didn’t fully realize just how consuming law school would be, even for someone as bookish as Shad. She quipped that if their marriage could survive that first three years, it could survive anything.

As they both scanned about the garden for a ripe vegetable that might be hiding, Dulsie remembered how nice it was that Shad no longer had to contemplate any free time as a chance to catch up on lost sleep. He’d dared to also continue working as a part-time night janitor while in law school, which probably only “brainiacs” like him could get away with.

“I think we got it all,” Dulsie glanced at Shad. Because they were working in the garden on a morning that was quickly getting hotter, they were dressed in summer work clothes. Shad was wearing denim shorts and a light green tee shirt, and Dulsie had on tan cotton shorts and a yellow tee shirt.

Dulsie turned her attention toward Sadie. The large white dog was lying outside the garden. Not only did the short fence keep her out, Sadie knew better than to try coming through the gate to join her masters. The dog was too bulky and klutzy to avoid trampling the plants. Her thick white coat looked pretty rough this time of year because the dog would pull out her own shedding hair as a way to cope with the heat, which actually sort of added to how intimidating Sadie could appear when she started to bark.

Barking was the first recourse in Sadie’s job to guard the turkeys. Although actually quite friendly, especially to people she knew, Sadie left no doubt in a coyote’s or stray dog’s mind that she would shred it to bits if it ventured too close. Dulsie was also quite proud that the dog had even mauled a couple of opossums and a raccoon in the past three years.

“What’re your plans for all this?” Shad glanced between their baskets of produce.

“Make fried okra and tomatoes for lunch.” Dulsie looked down at her own basket. “Have green beans with supper tonight. Make a squash casserole to take to dinner tomorrow.”

Every Sunday after First Day meeting, their families would gather at either the Wekenheiser home or the Delaney house to share a meal and visit.

“You sure about the casserole?” Shad asked. “You know we’re all eating squash these days.”

Dulsie laughed. “If we don’t eat them, they’ll take over the planet.”

“Maybe you could take some to work after this weekend and give them to your coworkers.”

“Are you kidding?” Dulsie grinned at him. “This time of year they make sure they lock their cars so nobody can leave a bag of squash in there.”

Dulsie led the way out of the garden, and after Shad closed the gate they walked together toward the house. Sadie lumbered to her feet and trotted over to one of the oak trees beside the house to lie down again in a shady area.

There was a stoop on the back corner of their house closest to the turkey gate. The door there opened into the kitchen, and when Dulsie and Shad entered they set the baskets on the counter beside the sink.

Dulsie had nicknamed this place the Handyman’s Delusion. It wasn’t a bad house, really, but it had issues related to both its age and the changing styles of the times. From the outside it was sort of cute with its broad front porch and white clapboard siding. But the inside showed either signs of wear or evidence where past repairs had been performed. The house was also a testament to modeling changes over the last eighty years.

With its two bedrooms and one bathroom it was only one room larger than the apartment they had rented while still living in Columbia. There was still no central air or heating installed, so a small furnace stood in one corner of the living room and a window air conditioner was perched at the side wall. Dulsie and Shad had added another cooling unit to one of their bedroom windows.

Every room but the bathroom had two windows, and all had all been replaced with aluminum storm windows over thirty years ago, adding to the eclectic timeframe of the house. The windows really did need replacing again. They were drafty and provided, Dulsie suspected, some of the many entryways the mice used to regularly show up in the house. At least during the summertime her discoveries of mice were much rarer because the snakes were as adept at getting in. Dulsie decided she preferred snakes to mice, but the first time somebody offered her a free kitten she would snatch it up.

Shad started taking tomatoes out from their baskets and setting the fruits closer to the sink while Dulsie picked up the wooden cutting board and drew a chef’s knife from the block at the other end of the counter.

“Beat it.” Dulsie walked around Shad and set the implements to the other side of the baskets.

Shad arched an eyebrow at her as he set the last tomato on the counter. “Looks like you mean it.”

Shad deferred to Dulsie in the kitchen. Although he could cook – his parents had seen to that – Shad needed a recipe and the right ingredients for any dish beyond “the basics.” Dulsie could look in the pantry and the refrigerator, fix items together and produce a meal. She would ask for Shad’s help whenever she had multiple tasks in operation, but otherwise like a typical Leeds woman Dulsie preferred to hone her cooking skills without someone less inventive in her way.

“I want to get all this stuff ready to go.” Dulsie began setting out the squash. “Maybe after lunch we can head over to your folks and see what the river’s doing.”

The back side of Uncle Pax’s farm was bordered by the Osage River. She and Shad had spent many hot afternoons swimming there.

“You want me to snap beans?”

“No.” Dulsie smirked as she glanced at him. “I’ll take it from here.”

Shad saw his opportunity to begin taking action on his discovery about Wally. Before he could do anything else, he’d decided, Shad needed to collect more information on the man. “How long are you gonna take?”

“This won’t take long.” Dulsie’s smirk deepened. “But I have some other things to do, so you have time to go play on the computer.”

Shad couldn’t figure out how it seemed Dulsie would keep reading his mind. “How did you know...?”

“My spider senses are tingling.” Dulsie glanced at him. “You asked how long it would take me, not if there was something else I wanted you to do. That means there’s something else you want to do, and usually that’s work on the computer.”

Shad half wondered how long it would be before Dulsie started finishing sentences for him. “Oh.” He turned away to leave the kitchen but glanced at her again as Shad approached the doorway to the living room. “You didn’t have to make it sound so obvious.”

He heard Dulsie chuckle as Shad entered the living room and immediately turned right to step into a small hallway. The door in front of him led to the bathroom. On his right was their bedroom, and to his left was the spare bedroom they used as an office.

After washing up in the bathroom, Shad went into the bedroom to retrieve his laptop before strolling into the office. He sat at the scraped up but solid wood desk he’d bought at a garage sale nearly ten years ago and pushed back the monitor of their desktop computer to set the laptop in its place and switch it on.

The laptop was newer and more powerful, a gift from Dulsie and both their parents when he completed law school but before he passed the bar. Dulsie had been able to learn from Shad exactly what he would want in a personal computer and saw to it this laptop filled the bill. It was the perfect gift. Before he gave in to the insane idea of becoming a lawyer, Shad had figured on going into computer programming as a career.

Actually he had originally wanted to be a farmer like Pap, but Pap told Shad to “get a day job” because it was increasingly difficult for a family to survive exclusively from the earnings on a family farm, even one as large as theirs. Pap had managed to remain a full-time farmer because Mam held a job at the school. The only reason Pap didn’t feel somewhat emasculated by the fact his wife was the first one in generations to have to hold a job was because Mam actually enjoyed her work as a secretary.

The choice for Shad’s career had seemed pretty obvious. He had no trouble spending long hours completely alone, and Shad preferred to deal with facts rather than more subjective problems. His talent surfaced only months after his parents brought him into their home. Mam got a new computer in the school office where she worked, and the change in programming was giving her fits. One day after classes she asked Shad if he wanted to look at it and see if the contraption made any sense to him.

It made perfect sense. Computers were utterly logical with their specific commands and predetermined responses. By the time Shad entered high school his parents bought a used computer which he managed to hone his skills on despite its obsolescence. And as soon as Shad was able to get on the internet regularly after Mam and Pap bought a new computer, he indulged in a personal challenge that was his worst ever defiance of the law.

He became a hacker. Shad never tampered with the files of another system or used confidential information unethically, but he took satisfaction from being able to break into programs that were designed to keep him out. Shad suspected his enjoyment of this form of rebellion was rooted in the abuse of authority he’d suffered in his earlier childhood. Although his parents were aware of what sites Shad would go into, it wasn’t until he was a junior in high school they figured out how he was getting into them.

“Isn’t this illegal?” Pap asked him that evening when they realized what Shad was doing.

Shad was scared they were going to take the computer away from him, but he was more concerned about the consequences that naturally came from a lie. “Well ... yeah.” He quickly added, “I’m not messing with anything, though. I’m just looking.”

“It’s an invasion of people’s privacy.” Pap frowned. “I know you wouldn’t want your privacy invaded.”

The discussion continued for at least an hour, and Shad became more convinced his parents were going to shut off their internet access. Pap had Shad show him how he managed to get past the security on the sites, then Pap sat in silence for what seemed like an eternity to Shad as the man stared at the monitor and absently stroked his beard.

“Tell me this,” Pap finally said. “When you become a programmer, you’re gonna use your knowledge about this stuff to come up with technology that will stop people like you.”

Shad agreed. His parents allowed him to continue, and Shad sometimes wondered if this was Pap’s way of encouraging him to keep up the Delaney notoriety. When Pap went into the hospital the following year, however, it started the chain of events that turned Shad away from the technology profession to actually consider law.

Ironically his questionable talent was an asset to Shad in his work as an attorney. Although illegally obtained information wasn’t admissible in court, for Shad just having the knowledge was a powerful advantage. Research was one aspect to his job Shad actually liked, so he had a tendency to overindulge in it.

Right now he needed all the information he could get on Walden Palmer.

It was easy enough to start with the website Shad had learned was associated with Wally’s business. From there he began delving into information that wasn’t normally available without paying a fee or hiring a detective. He already knew Wally was still living in the St. Louis area, and before very long Shad had his mailing address and phone number. Then he discovered Wally owned the property with his wife.

Wife? Had Wally merely altered his modus operandi to actually marry a woman instead of simply move in with her to gain access to a young son? Was the marriage a better front for the public persona that would make people believe Wally would never do such a thing to a child? Was it possible the wife belonged to the ranks of those few women who were also molesters? Such females were a minority, but they often got started by pleasing male molesters they became attached to.

Shad did a background check on the wife, Lynette. She had been formerly married and given birth to two sons ... but both were legal adults now. A search on the sons revealed that neither was married, so Wally apparently wasn’t preying on any grandkids. And Lynette’s record was clean in regard to any run-ins with the law.

Could Wally be putting together a personal harem from boys drawn to the business? Shad’s research on the history of the chain revealed Wally opened the original store eight years ago, five years before his marriage to Lynette.

Further focus on Wally gave Shad his political party affiliation, former addresses, when and where he was born, what vehicles he owned and even some banking information. Shad also confirmed this was Wally’s first marriage.

Most frustrating, but unsurprising, was the fact Wally’s record was clean.

Shad leaned back in his chair and stared at the screen of latest information on the laptop. Wally had been a rather young man when he had access to Shad, perhaps barely in his twenties. He’d probably starting molesting boys back in his teens. The best case scenario was that Wally managed to find a woman with a four-year-old son whom he would live with until the son was seven, then Wally would move on to a new hunting ground. That could possibly reduce the number of Wally’s victims to around twelve to fifteen.

The numbers were of no comfort to Shad. He was convinced Wally was a molester because first he was a pedophile – someone who was physically attracted to children, usually of a specific age and gender. And Shad had no guarantee that even while he was such an easy target for Wally the man didn’t turn his affection toward a few boys on the side. Odds were Wally had molested more than fifteen boys. At least Shad was also convinced that Wally wasn’t simply an opportunist who took advantage of any child just because he or she became accessible to him. Those types of molesters usually turned out to be the really dangerous ones because their motivation wasn’t based on attraction. They committed the act because those children were simply there and convenient to victimize.

He wasn’t going to think about Brody.

The one thing the different types had in common was their ability to continue their lives in relative peace and security while upsetting the lives of victims. They were able to keep the children silent by abuse of power. The control might be as blatant as threatening to hurt or kill the child or a family member or a pet if the victim told anyone. It might be as subtle as Wally’s technique of convincing the child this was normal behavior, and also by keeping the boy’s trust with attention and gifts. Children were commonly told that nobody would believe them if they said anything, and unfortunately this could easily be the case if the molester were a friend or part of the family ... and many of them were.

There was, however, another possibility for Shad to consider.

Often when these predators were caught they were sent into counseling. Statistically the counseling didn’t seem to help much because the majority of perpetrators would commit the same offense again. Occasionally counseling did seem to help when certain individuals voluntarily entered therapy even though they weren’t caught. But those people genuinely wanted to stop that activity. Regardless, as far as pedophilia went, nobody knew what caused it and therefore nobody had figured out how to eradicate it.

There was no such thing as coincidence. Shad figured there had to be a reason he discovered Wally now, only weeks after he could no longer press criminal charges. Maybe Wally had changed his ways ... but if that were the case, why did Shad have to stumble upon that article at all? Was this some kind of trial to determine if Shad was becoming the kind of lawyer his parents should have been able to get seventeen years ago? Was he being challenged to think outside the boundaries of the law in order to secure justice?

Wasn’t he getting enough of that already with Charissa’s case?

Because Shad wound up adopted into a branch of faith that proclaimed God was still an active participant in humanity’s affairs, and it was the responsibility of humanity to respond to His calling, Shad became a lawyer. As much as that sounded like an oxymoronic statement, it was still the result of Shad’s first discernment that he was actually receiving divine inspiration. Although the Society of Friends affirmed that everyone had equal access to God, Shad often doubted he shared that much potential. Certainly he had benefited from the inspiration received by others, but his personal experience demonstrated more “quality” than quantity. Begrudgingly he became an attorney. At least his marriage to Dulsie seemed like a celestial reward. But now he had to struggle with what to do about Wally.

And the very fact he harbored reluctance about investigating the man produced evidence Shad had been assigned the obligation to do exactly that. For many reasons it would be easier to turn his back on this discovery and convince himself that Wally was no longer a threat, rather than contend with such a difficult assignment.

But children’s lives could be at stake. And if Shad became an attorney because he was supposed to defend the rights of the disadvantaged, then he had to fulfill his responsibility. Giving up this challenge would only be an act of cowardice and a mockery to his family.