Accused: A Rosato & Associates Novel (12 page)

“They should. I worried the whole day about it falling off.” Mary slid the ring off her finger and handed it back to him. “You think you can take it back?”

“You should come with me, don’t you think?”

“Oh, right, of course.” Mary picked up a napkin from the holder on the table, wrapped the ring inside, and put it in her skirt pocket. When she lifted her head, Anthony was looking at her funny. She asked, “What is it?”

“I feel like that’s an accident waiting to happen. Don’t forget it’s in there and take the skirt to the dry cleaner’s or something.”

“I won’t.”

Anthony’s expression darkened. “Listen, there’s something important I need to ask you about, though. You need to be sitting down. It’s a hard question.”

“For real?” Mary’s heart sank. “Didn’t we just do this last night?”

Anthony blinked, frowning in confusion. “No, last night I asked you to marry me. That wasn’t a hard question, was it?”

“No, of course not, I didn’t mean it that way.” Mary flushed, busted. “I was just tired. Sorry.” She sat down opposite him. “What is it you wanted to ask me?”

“Well, it’s about your dress.”

“What dress?”

“Your wedding dress. I’m giving you the heads-up. I think my mother wants to go with you and your mother when you try them on. Is that okay?”

“Of course,” Mary answered, relieved. She hadn’t pictured anyone but her mother, Judy, and maybe even Angie coming along when she tried on wedding dresses, but she hadn’t really imagined trying on wedding dresses yet, at all. “Sure, she’s welcome. It’ll be fun.”

“Thanks.” Anthony broke into a grateful smile. “She was asking me about when you and your mom are going for your dress. She knows you and your mother are really close and she won’t ask. She wouldn’t want you to think she was overstepping her bounds.”

“Not at all,” Mary said, rising. Her face felt warm, and her mouth had gone dry, but she was telling herself it was the salty olives. “I called her Mom today.”

“She told me.” Anthony rose, coming over and slipping an arm around Mary’s shoulders. “That was so sweet of you. She called me afterwards, crying.”

“Really?” Mary felt touched.

“She always wanted a daughter, and who wouldn’t want a daughter like you?”

“Aw, thanks,” Mary said, her heart lighter as they turned off the lights and left the kitchen. She felt relieved not to have the ring on her finger any longer, as if a weight had been lifted off her mind, or she was back to being herself again.

Maybe it would take her a while to get to the jeweler.

Later, after Anthony had gone to sleep, Mary awoke, sneaked in to her home office, and closed the door quietly behind her, flicking on the light. She padded in her pink bathrobe and bare feet to her desk, sat down, and moved the computer mouse to wake up the laptop.

She navigated to the Internet, went to Google, and plugged in
girl genius helicopter
, and a line of articles popped onto the page, just like last night. She clicked on the first article, again from the city’s tabloid, with a headline,
FIERY FATAL CRASH ON PLAYGROUND
, above a horrific scene of orange-red flames blazing skyward from the blackened carcasses of a helicopter and an airplane.

Mary swallowed hard, scrolling down to read the article, which showed a school picture of Allegra in first grade, her eyes preternaturally serious behind her glasses, with just the barest hint of a smile, and her long hair tied back too severely to be cool or pretty. The caption read,
ALLEGRA GARDNER, who predicted the crash only minutes before, from watching wind currents on the playground.

Mary cringed, knowing what that kind of notoriety could cause, and she read on, but the article provided no new details beyond what John Gardner had told her today. Still she clicked Print, then Close, and went to the next article. She’d read that, too, printed it like the others, and would bring them into the office, where she could put them up on their own easel in the war room, next to the articles about the murder. She knew that it wasn’t necessarily relevant, but the more Mary knew about Allegra, the more she wanted to know.

She worked the rest of the night that way, in silence and solitude, a woman sitting in front of a computer, reading until the blackness outside had lifted and ceded the sky not to sun, but to the thickest of cloud covers, impenetrable. And when she realized it was dawn, Mary found herself looking out the window, wondering what it was like to be able to see through the clouds like Allegra, to be able to sense disaster in the very wind, before it struck.

Saving everyone, but sacrificing yourself.

Chapter Fourteen

The sky was incongruously clear and sunny over SCI Graterford, which was Pennsylvania’s largest maximum-security prison, located in Collegeville, about thirty miles west of Philadelphia. Presently, it housed an all-time high of 3,700 adult male felons on 1,700 acres, which made it sound positively bucolic, if you’d never seen the place.

“Honey, we’re home.” Mary cut the ignition, and Judy regarded the prison in somber silence. It was a massive concrete structure, the oldest part of which dated from 1929, with brick additions built in the intervening years. Much of the prison remained hidden behind a grimy fifty-foot-high wall of stained concrete, topped by barbed concertina wire and old-school turrets with armed guards, like ominous black shadows behind windows of bulletproof glass.

“Remind me never to do anything bad, ever.” Judy chuckled, nervously. “How do I look? Undesirable? Gender-free? No fun in general?”

Mary glanced over, and Judy was dressed in their agreed-upon outfit of jeans, flats, and a white shirt with a dark blazer. “Are you trying to make me laugh, because it won’t work. Maximum security always puts me in a bad mood.”

“Occupational hazard for a criminal lawyer.”

“Let’s go.” Mary knew they wouldn’t be allowed to bring their phones or handbags, so she pocketed her keys, slid her ID from her wallet, grabbed a legal pad and pen, while Judy did the same, and they got out of the car, walking through the large parking lot to the entrance, which had a concrete overhang.

“Hey, where’s your engagement ring?” Judy asked, as they passed a black van that read Coroner’s Office, Montgomery County. “Did you leave it home so the bad guys don’t steal it?”

“No, it needs to be resized.”

“Why?” Judy smiled slyly. “It fit you perfectly.”

“It was big, and I didn’t want to lose it.”

“God forbid.” Judy chuckled, and Mary tried not to notice the long Pennsylvania D.O.C. bus with grates over the smoked windows, idling noisily at the curb.

“I
don’t
want to lose my ring.”

“But if it fell down the drain, or disappeared down the sewer, or got flushed down the toilet, or spontaneously combusted, you might not mind.”

“Stop.” Mary couldn’t smile because the prison was giving her the heebie-jeebies. She couldn’t imagine spending the next fifty years behind these thick concrete walls.

“Anything could happen to it, accidentally on purpose. Unfortunately, it’s carbon, the most indestructible substance known to man, so unless you wander into an atomic blast, you have to deal with that ring, sooner or later.”

“Enough. Get your head in the game.” Mary climbed the concrete steps to the entrance and walked through the smudged glass doors, with Judy falling into step behind her.

They entered a waiting room that looked ancient enough to have been part of the original building. It was a long rectangle, only dimly lit by small windows at the end of the room and panels of fluorescent lighting, in the ceiling of peeling white paint. The floor was of a grimy tan linoleum, apparently inadvertently matching the tan, battered lockers that ringed the far side of the room, behind rows of old-fashioned wooden benches. Visitors filled the benches, under a sign that read NO SPANDEX, NO HOODIES. There was a large wooden reception desk across the room, staffed by a slim female corrections officer, wearing a black uniform with the yellow patch of the Department of Corrections.

They made a beeline for the reception desk, and Mary took the lead, placing her driver’s license across the counter. “We’re here to see Lonnie Stall. We’re attorneys, and we called ahead to be put on his visitors’ list.”

“That’s fine. Sign in, please.” The corrections officer slid an old-school sign-in log across the counter, and Mary signed them both in while Judy handed in her driver’s license, the corrections officer examined them, then handed them back. She gestured at the benches. “Take a seat, and we’ll call you in a minute. He’s been approved for legal mail.”

Mary didn’t understand. “We don’t have any for him.”

“No, he has some for you.”

“Oh, okay.” Mary was nonplussed, but she didn’t want to let it show in front of the corrections officer, because she had implied on the phone call that she was Lonnie Stall’s lawyer, referred by one Allegra Gardner. It was the only way to get the visit on such short notice, since lawyers and clergymen generally had unlimited visits in state prisons.

“Here we go.” Judy led them over to the first long bench, which reminded Mary of a pew and turned out to be just as comfortable, when Mary sat down and looked around. There were roughly ten benches full of all kinds of people, all ages and ethnicities; an older African-American man reading a discarded newspaper, a heavyset white woman who was pregnant, a pretty young Asian woman applying lip gloss, and a middle-aged Hispanic woman with a toddler on her lap.

Mary’s heart went out to each of them, and what struck her mostly was the very mundaneness of their manner, even the way they talked among themselves or to each other. None of these visitors felt nervous or edgy, but they were here to visit someone they loved and had been visiting undoubtedly for years, since all of the inmates at Graterford had been sentenced for major crimes. For their families, the horror of the setting had become routine, and Mary wondered if the fact of the crimes themselves had become routine, as well. She prayed not.

“Lonnie Stall!” a corrections officer called out, motioning them forward, and Mary and Judy rose together and walked toward a grimy metal door, which the corrections officer opened with a loud metallic
ca-chunk.
“Take off your belts, shoes, and jewelry, and put them in the bins, ladies.”

“Thank you,” Mary said, as they passed through the door together and entered a narrow room that held an old wooden table with wooden bins, in front of a metal detector. The air felt warmer and closer, but that could’ve been her imagination. She couldn’t deny that it felt strange to be admitted to the secured part of a maximum-security prison, full of murderers, rapists, and other violent offenders, with the proverbial door clanging closed behind them. She had read on the website that Graterford housed a significant proportion of inmates serving life without parole and it had one of the two Death Rows in Pennsylvania.

Mary and Judy went through the metal detector, collected their belongings, had the back of their right hands stamped and read by an ultraviolet light, and were led through one locked door, then the next, being watched by prison guards behind a smoked glass panel. They were admitted into an old narrow staircase with painted cinderblock on either side and traveled down the nonskid steps, where the air grew hot enough to make it difficult to breathe.

The stairwell bottomed in a large visiting room the shape of an L, with vending machines on the right and rows of faded red, blue, and tan chairs, filled with people visiting inmates in brown jumpsuits, without handcuffs. The sound of conversation, laughter, and tears filled the room, and the air conditioners were no match for the collective body heat, strong perfumes, and stale cigarette smoke that clung to many of the visitors. A large sign read,
Inmates and Visitors May Embrace When Meeting And Departing Only.
An elevated wooden chair against the wall held a brawny young lieutenant, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and black pants with a gray line down the side. His eyes scanned the room under the black bill of his white cap, a walkie-talkie crackling in its belt holster.

“Ladies, this way to the attorney booths,” the female corrections officer said over her shoulder, leading Mary and Judy through the rows of visitors and inmates, with no more concern then someone going down the aisle in a movie theater. “You’ve never been here before, have you?”

“No,” Mary answered for the both of them. She gestured at an area beyond the chairs to the right, enclosed by thick, scratched glass. “What’s that?”

“That’s for inmates who can only have no-contact visits.”

“Who would that be? Inmates from Death Row?”

“No, capital-case inmates have a visiting room upstairs, all to themselves. What you’re looking at is the visiting area for J-block and L-block, which are our restricted units, for inmates who got written up for misconduct. Things like that.”

Judy looked at a line of paintings that covered the cinderblock wall, as if she were at a nightmare art show. “Is that inmate art?”

“Yes it is,” answered the corrections officer, and they passed scenes of moonlit oceans, a pastoral landscape, a portrait of Elvis, an Eagles logo, and a still life of red wine with several hunks of cheese, which would’ve been at home in a fine Italian restaurant. The correctional officer pointed to the left. “Outside is a pretty mural the Mural Arts Program did for us.”

Mary looked to her left, where there was a long line of tall windows that overlooked a grassy outdoor area with picnic tables and blue-and-white umbrellas. On one end was a cheery children’s playground with a bright yellow slide and blue monkey bars, and beyond that a colorful mural depicting children at play, which read CHERISH THIS CHILD. But even the mural couldn’t dispel the grimness of the gray concrete wall that bordered the yard, topped with spiky concertina wire. Mary realized it was the inside of the wall they had seen from outside the prison.

“And there is another mural the program made for us.” The corrections officer gestured, and Mary looked over. Hanging on a wooden rack was a mural depicting a stone archway with a cobalt blue river winding into the distance. She knew that prisons often provided idyllic backdrops for inmates to use in photographs, on days when family picture-taking was authorized.