“Not a lot of material here,” she said.
“Nope.”
“So?”
“I’m covering this because I grew up with the defendant. We were friends.” I added, “She could not have done this.”
“Yet here we are,” the reporter said. “Still, you’re a hundred percent right. She’s presumed innocent. You heard the judge.” She added, “I’m Sally, by the way.”
“Reenie,” I said. “Irene Bigelow.”
Later, when the older reporter and I knew each other better, I would find out that Sally Zankow was famous. She worked for National Public Radio, and her crime features and commentary were heard all over the country. Having covered crime since her hair was naturally that golden, she knew police and prosecutors all over the Midwest as well as she knew her own siblings. She would teach me the best lesson I ever learned as a writer: Contrary to what you saw on TV, you didn’t have to be afraid to ask anybody anything because, most of the time, that person would tell you what you wanted to know. People in and around law enforcement were big gossips. I would also find out that what I initially took for disdain toward me among the rest of the reporters, who grew daily in numbers once the trial was underway, was really something else. The cable TV reporters especially, who were many as rabbits and paid like mice, envied me my pretty clothes—as well as the fact that I would probably never have to stand on the street in a blizzard watching firefighters carry the blackened bodies of children from a firetrap tenement.
“Death threats,” Sally said. “That’s why this arraignment was sequestered.” There had been death threats against the judge, against Felicity, and even against her defense lawyer. Nobody was sure what it was about this case that inflamed so many crazy callers. Arraignments normally took place in batches, with defendants sometimes waiting for hours for their case to come up lest they lose their moment, which would mean starting the whole process over again.
“How long will this take?” I asked Sally.
“The whole trial? Weeks for sure, once it gets going. Could be a month or more.”
We’d worked our way to the aisle by then... and it was as Felicity, at the door, was waiting for her shackles to be replaced that she glanced around her and finally saw me. Her face opened with a recognition so poignant tears flooded my eyes. She was too far away for me to hear her speak but I could see her mouth move:Reenie.A smile ghosted across her face, briefly revealing her enviable dimples.
I had tried half a dozen times before this moment to reach Felicity, but my petitions to visit were turned away, my phone calls refused, my letters unanswered. Now, clearly, she had changed her mind. She was grateful for the presence of someone from home.
So I was shocked when Felicity mouthed the words,Go away.
Two
American Crow
Corvus brachyrhynchos.Crows show remarkable intelligence. An eighteenth-century tale tells of “counting crows,” in which a crow proved it could count to five with a logic trap set by a farmer. Crows demonstrate episodic memory, recalling events in order, as humans do. Crows and magpies are curious, prone to stealing bright objects. They recognize their own faces in a mirror, use tools, and engage in play such as midair jousting, which they need to stimulate their intellect. Researchers say there would be more examples of corvid intelligence except that scientists measure only those ways that birds behave like human beings rather than like birds. In folklore, these birds symbolize death.
I still believed that Felicity would talk to me. She had to.
After the arraignment, though, I had to admit that the odds weren’t great. One thing I knew was true. When Felicity said no, she said it only once.
At the very least, I would be able to tell my editor that I had used every key to try every lock in every door. There’s no limit to the number of times you can try the same key in a different lock until that key opens something, even though tenacity and ingenuity are two different things, and I had plenty of the former and not much of the latter. My dad told me once that the number of permutations with the digits one throughten was more than three million and I still don’t know what he was talking about. More usefully, my mom used to say that the answer to any question was in the question; the key was finding the right question.
I tried calling Felicity at the jail. Whoever answered told me to hold on, and then, after a minute or so, returned to say that Miss Wild was unavailable. Like she was in a meeting? Or on another call?
I wrote six letters to Felicity, each one different from the one before it.
The first was just a greeting to inquire about her condition in there. Did she need blankets? Was I allowed to send her a better pillow? Felicity was strong and athletic but fragile, one of those people who got strep every year but was so stoic she always waited until she was almost too sick to go anywhere but the ER. I had to believe she was suffering. Dane County jail might not be Alcatraz, but it stifled my breath even to imagine myself locked in a room that was maybe eighty square feet, the size of an average bathroom, with the only window high above my sight line and crosshatched with steel wires embedded in the glass. She had never been a good sleeper: I couldn’t count the number of sleepover nights I’d awakened to find her reading or just looking at me in the darkness, her amber eyes like strange lanterns.
The next letter was about the case. That one came back to me inside a larger envelope from Damiano, Chen, and Damiano, Attorneys at Law.
So I wrote again, this time drawing little scenes of some of our old memories, which I thought might give her some comfort. There was the time Felicity agreed to babysit for a squirrel monkey, the pet of the people at her church. Almost all animals were helpless with love for Felicity, but this one, which was named Bushman for some famous gorilla, was the exception. The cage was the size of a Volkswagen and once we got it into the houseand pulled off the towels wrapped around it, the creepy little creature peed all over Felicity. Within an hour, we learned that Bushman could pick the lock on his cage too. Of course, he escaped, then proceeded to bite Ruth, then climbed into the pantry to rip apart bags of dried beans and boxes of cereal—I never saw anything without wheels or wings that could move that fast.
Rev. Wild commanded us to take it back. As if we could even catch it. Even if we did, the owners were out of town, like... Portugal out of town. By late afternoon, Felicity and I were exhausted. I had to go home for some reason, I don’t remember what, but when I came back, the monkey was still at large. The next thing we heard was Felicity’s stepfather screaming. Apparently, he went into the darkened downstairs bathroom. There, he experienced the terrifying sensation of tiny hands clutching at his rear end. Felicity heard her stepfather’s strangled cries as though he was having a heart attack. Somewhere between hysterical laughter and hysterical tears, she rescued Bushman from the toilet, where he had fallen in and was weakly treading water, for who knew how long?
We used to make each other laugh by making little monkey hand motions across the classroom or the street. And I drew a stick figure of a monkey poking its head out of a toilet.
There was no answer to any of those letters.
Finally, I went to the jail.
According to Sally, arranging a visit was this whole process and she said I might as well take my chances. So I just showed up.
At the desk, I spoke to a wispy blonde woman who looked far too fragile to be a prison guard, although maybe she was just a receptionist. Of course, she asked me if I was expected and made the same face I would have made if someone answered,Not exactly...Pulling a pen out of her messy updo, she pointed at a metal table where a guy was sitting with his back to me. “Ask her lawyer,” she said.
