Chapter One, Keeping Secrets, A Legal Thriller
THE EXECUTION ORDER
“I am dying in my own death and in the
deaths of those after me.”
T.S. Eliot
CHAPTER ONE
Tuesday, January 3, 2017, I-95 South from Richmond to Death Row at Sussex State Prison, Sussex, Virginia
Brendan Murphy drove south on the I-95 toward Sussex that morning with his heart aching. He glanced over at his briefcase on the passenger seat next to him, wishing he could toss it out the window. He imagined it coming to rest in a half frozen puddle of dirty snow along the shoulder of the freeway, languishing there with Edward Wynne Carter III’s execution warrant unread and unnoticed.
If only saving Ed’s life could be that direct and simple. Brendan had been trying for thirty-one years to make the Commonwealth of Virginia admit that Ed had not killed his barely pregnant wife, Anne Fairfax Carter, on a cold November night in 1983, while their four-year-old son Wynne slept in his crib, behind the locked door of his nursery. But to no avail. The Commonwealth’s Attorney, Gordon Martin Fairfax and Anne’s first cousin, was so hell bent on vengeance that he had thrice convicted the wrong man.
“Why did you take this case?” his wife Emma had asked him last night as they sat in front of the fire in the spacious great room of their six-thousand-square-foot, three-story, brick colonial in Richmond’s exclusive Windsor Farms.
They were slowing down at sixty-six. The thought made him smile as he drove. Now they liked to sit in front of the fire at night, talking and sipping good scotch, instead of going to concerts and dinner parties, and charity events. Well, he didn’t mind. He’d spent his career in the Richmond office of Craig, Lewis, and Weller. He’d officially retired last October. He was still a partner, but now his name appeared in the “Of Counsel” column on the firm’s letterhead. He went to his office only three days a week, and he had handed off most of his cases to other attorneys. But not Ed’s. He hadn’t wanted to give up his hard-charging career this early, but Emma, an accomplished pediatric cardiologist, had insisted. Stress had taken its toll, and he’d had a serious heart attack last spring.
To encourage him to back down from long hours at the firm, she had reduced her own hours at the Medical College of Virginia. She taught only one class and saw patients in her office only two days a week. Now they had time to spend with their grandchildren, five-year-old Jamie, Timothy’s son, and four-year-old Gwen, Ellen’s daughter. They spent days at King’s Dominion and Williamsburg, and went to visit the animals at Maymont Farms. And at Christmas, Brendan had overseen Jamie and Gwen’s delighted squeals as they had sledded on the softly sloping hill in the backyard that Ellen and Timothy had loved so well.
But now the magical Christmas snow was nothing but gray slush, and Brendan was on the saddest journey of his life. He glanced down and saw that the Range Rover was picking up speed too easily. He wanted the fifty-minute commute to last as long as possible to delay the minute when he’d have to look into Ed’s kind brown eyes and tell him that he would draw his last breath on Friday, March 3 at 9 p.m. in the execution chamber at Greensville State Prison at Jarrat, Virginia.
“Ed’s mother asked me to take his case,” Brendan drew Emma closer as they cuddled on the sofa under an afghan she had knitted.
“Caroline Randolph Carter?”
He nodded. “She knew me from church.”
“I’m surprised the firm let you accept it.”
“I wasn’t. Although my section of litigation accepted only white collar crime for our corporate clients, Craig, Lewis wasn’t about to turn down the matriarch of the Carter and Wynne families of Carter’s Grove Plantation.”
“Why didn’t you represent Ed in his first trial?”
“Caroline wouldn’t help him the first time around. She thought it was beneath a Carter to get himself arrested for murder. He was represented by Brad O’Connor over at the Public Defender’s Office. But when the Virginia Supreme Court threw out his first conviction, she decided she’d better spend some money to get the truth in front of a jury. But damn it, Emma, no jury has ever understood that Ed was in Charlottesville presenting a paper at a legal conference the night Anne was murdered.”
Emma rubbed his cheek softly. “I know how hard this is for you. Promise you won’t let the stress get to you.”
He kissed her softly on the cheek. “I wish I could make you that promise. But I only have sixty days left to save Ed’s life.”
“So you’re going to try for a stay?”
“A stay, a commutation, a pardon. Whatever the hell I can get. He’s innocent, Emma, you know that. I’m not going to let the Commonwealth murder an innocent man who’s become my friend.”
She laid her head on his shoulder and stroked his cheek. “I have some happier news.”
He looked down at her. She was still beautiful. She cut her hair short now to accent her wide, dark eyes, always full of compassion and love. The extra pounds of middle age still sat well on her five-seven frame. She had beautiful hands with long graceful fingers that stitched together tiny hearts in the OR. She’d chosen the right profession, he thought. She was a consummate healer.
“I’d love to hear something cheerful.”
“Claire is finally getting married.”
“Claire? Our Claire? Tyndall’s daughter? Ellen’s best friend from St. Catherine’s?”
“Yes! Isn’t it great news?”
“Not if it’s to that jerk who led her on for years and then broke her heart last summer with some woman he’d just met.”
“No, it’s not him. He lives in San Diego or Los Angeles. I’m not sure which. Ellen said Claire’s fiancé lives in New York. She met him after she went back last spring. He’s a couple of years older than Claire. Ellen said he’s done very well in venture capital.”
“Then he isn’t marrying Claire for her money.” As he spoke, he wiggled out of her grasp and started to get up, but she put out her hand.
“Why do I think you are going to the liquor cabinet for a refill?”
“Because I am.”
“No, you’re not. It’s nearly midnight, and you said you’ll be leaving for Sussex at eight in the morning. Your heart needs sleep, not more scotch.”
“I don’t think I can sleep.”
“Try. But no more scotch. Come on, let’s go to bed.”
How lucky am I, he thought, as they climbed the stairs together. I have her and Tim and Ellen and Gwen and Jamie and more money than I’ll ever spend. Ed was supposed to have those things, too. I can’t let him die. I can’t let him die.
To see what happens next, click on the image below!
Daddy
I stopped buying Father’s Day cards when I was twenty-three. When the holiday rolled around that year, I considered for the first time what people do who have no one to buy a card for. After mulling it over for several days, I decided to buy one for my uncle, my father’s younger brother. It said, “To A Wonderful Uncle on Father’s Day.” I figured Daddy would have approved.
He died the day before my twenty-third birthday. He’d been in the hospital for two weeks, and only my mother knew that he wasn’t coming home. My mother, my sister, and I had just left the ICU where we’d sat with the unconscious shell of him the way we did every day. We were headed for the parking lot, when a nurse called us back. He’s just taken a turn, she said. We’ve thought he was going to pass all day, she said. He was just waiting for you to come and say goodbye, she said. As soon as you walked out, he went.
I tell myself that after forty-five years, I can still remember him. I tell myself that my memories go deeper than remembering that November 10 is his birthday or August 2 is the day he died or that he smoked Camel cigarettes or that he was buried in the brown suit that he’d owned for only one month or that we put yellow roses on his coffin because my sister, ever the bossy know-it-all, thought he liked yellow ones best.
One of my most vivid memories is lying on a blanket with him and my sister in the backyard on balmy August nights, staring up the stars. His weekend wear consisted of a white T-shirt and khaki pants, a break from the suits his job required all week. The faint odor of tobacco smoke always clung to him, mixed with the scent of Dial soap and Old Spice aftershave and a trace of what my sister and I would later learn was the cheap, sickly sweet-sour bourbon that would eventually kill him.
He had a soft voice that never lingered long over the letter “r”. He once spent an entire evening schooling my sister and I to say “cha-uh” instead of “cheer.” He was born on a very small, poor farm in upper East Tennessee in a town that he called a “wide place in the road.” Yet, somehow he escaped the Appalachian twang that calls a “fire” a “far” and a “tire” a “tar.” He was the first member of his family to graduate from college. He was a math and science whiz and incredibly bright.
We’d lie on the blanket at night and stare up at that vast black sky, and he’d point to the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper and tell us how to find the North Star. He’d insist that anyone who could find the North Star could find his way home. We’d beg him to tell stories, and he would tell us about growing upon the farm. He would talk about hunting and fishing, and his dogs. He would never mention being too poor to have an inside bathroom or going to school in a one-room schoolhouse. Even though he told the same stories over and over, we never grew tired of them. We had our favorites that we’d beg him to repeat. They were like jewels that he’d take out in the dark and polish in the starlight, nuggets of family history that only he could pass on to us.
We stopped lying on the blanket, watching the stars on summer nights by the time that I was eleven. Daddy still did all the things for “his girls” that made me, in particular, feel special. A red candy heart at Valentines. A wrist corsage of pink roses for Easter. A small gift whenever he came back from a business trip. But he had old secrets and old wounds that I was too young to understand that ate at him. As the years went by, the cheap bourbon changed him, and the bottles that he’d bring home in the brown paper bags became more important to him than lying on the blanket finding the North Star. The pain of his past was too great and he lost his way, despite knowing that our love for him was always his North Star.
The Legal Thriller Business
This has not been the week that I thought it would be. First, I thought that my new puppy, Summer Moon, would stop harassing her much older brother, Rhythm, after I followed Caesar Milan’s sage guidelines for introducing a new puppy to an older dog. Wrong. Summer has yet to learn that (1) Rhythm is Head Dog and (2) she’s a Golden Retriever Puppy, not a baby Dragon, (3) and Caesar is supposedly RIGHT in all things DOG. And just to prove her contempt for TRAINING, she swiped a burrito off the kitchen counter tonight and ate half of it before being discovered. Sigh!
Second, I was unwittingly drawn into a conflict with the company that services my lap pool. About two weeks ago, it began to bubble like a cauldron. Getting into the spirit of Halloween, I thought. But since a pool is not a cauldron, I called the pool service to ask them to come take a look. That request degenerated into a demand that I (1) tell them what is wrong with the pool and (2) (well, since I didn’t know what was wrong) take pictures of the bubbles. I told them I would be thrilled to pay them $75 to come diagnose it since (1) they are supposed to know what’s wrong, and (2) I was working on a brief for the California Supreme Court and I didn’t have time to take pictures of bubbles. Eventually, the pool tech appeared, mumbled something about the auto-flow, and promised to have yet another tech who actually fixes things come to make the repair. But a week went by, and no fixer pool tech ever appeared. I thought of calling the office, but after my last conversation with the receptionist, I figured I’d just wait for the saner pool tech to reappear and summon the fixer pool tech.
But when the saner pool tech did reappear, I learned that psycho-receptionist was working to have him fired. Apparently, that’s why she never sent the fixer pool tech. She wanted to be able to say that the sane one had dropped the ball. Which he did not do. In the end, I had to call the owner of the company and tell him I wouldn’t be using his pool service anymore. The saner tech had done a good job, but the psycho in the office was not a force I wanted to go on reckoning with. I didn’t want my pool caught in whatever vendetta she had against the saner pool tech. The owner promised free repair and pool service for a month, but I didn’t want to deal with any more unprofessional behavior from his front office. I said, thanks, but no thanks, and hired a new pool service.
I felt a little sorry for the owner. He has just bought the business, and every customer is important to him. But apparently he didn’t realize that he took over a front office that doesn’t share his goals.
The lesson for me is that any business is built one customer at a time. That’s why I’m grateful for every new reader who finds one of my legal thrillers and decides to give it a try.
LOVE WAS, LOVE IS, LOVE IS TO COME
I was sitting at the vet’s office this morning, waiting for Summer Moon’s appointment for her second puppy shot. She’s been home since September 11, and Rhythm and I have been adjusting to being a two-retriever household again.
The vet’s office has glass doors on all the exam rooms; and across the waiting room, I could see a woman bending over a dog, lying on the exam table. She was obviously waiting for the vet to come in. But more than that, the angle of her body and the way she held her dog, told me that she was pouring out all the love and comfort she had on a seriously ill pet. My heart ached. That was me, back in May, holding Melody, my twelve-year-old Golden Retriever, and telling the Universe not to take her. Please, please, please. Not my Melody. Not now. Not yet. Not ever. Please.
Melody
Well, I lost that round. Obviously. And, as I sat watching the woman on the other side of the glass and sending her all my love and prayers, I also thanked the Universe for starting me on another journey with a new, beloved pet.
Summer Moon
But then it hit me. Hard, and then harder. Love is still who we are, really. Fundamentally. At our core. We love each other. We love our pets. We love the small moments that make life wonderful and magical. A sunny day. The first hint of autumn. A vermillion leaf on the sidewalk. A rainy day and a cup of hot tea with honey. The smile of a husband or a wife or a child. We love on in the face of loss. We love unconditionally. We are champions at love.
As I sat in the vet’s waiting room, I realized that I was looking at love through the glass door where the woman stood over the table, holding her dog. There are terrible people in the world who do terrible things. We’ve seen that yet again this week. But the black souls among us cannot change the true meaning of US, which is love.
I didn’t see the lady and her dog when we came out of the exam room after Summer’s checkup. But I hope the vet sent her home with good news. I was grateful for the moment when I’d seen her behind the glass and realized that love is truly the driving force inside us. Love, I told myself as I left with the exuberant new life the Universe has entrusted to me. Love. Focus, focus, focus.
Finalist, Beverly Hills International Book Awards, 2014
Finalist, Foreword Reviews Book of the Year, 2013
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