Life Sentences Read online

  But where was Calliope in all of this? The girl-woman who was supposed to be at the center of Cassandra’s story remained a cipher, quiet and self-contained. No matter how hard Cassandra tried to trigger memories of Callie, she was merely there. She didn’t get in trouble, she didn’t not get in trouble. Was there a clue in that? Was she the kind of child who tortured animals? Did she steal? There had been a rash of lunchbox thefts one year, with all the girls’ desserts taken. Was there something in Callie’s home life that had taught her early on that it was better not to attract attention? Cassandra had a vague impression—it couldn’t even be called a memory—of an angry, defensive woman, quick to suspect that she was being mocked or treated unfairly, the kind of woman given to yanking children by the meat of the upper arm, to hissing, You are on my last nerve. She had done that at the birthday party, upon coming to gather Callie. No, wait—Fatima’s mother had picked the two up, and she would not have grabbed another woman’s child that way. Still, Cassandra believed she had witnessed this scene with Callie, not Fatima.

  Abuse—inevitable in such a story, but also a little, well, tiresome. She hoped it didn’t turn out to be that simple, abused child grows up to be abusive mother. Hitting the wall of her own memory, but feeling too tentative to press forward in her search for the living, breathing Calliope, she decided to spend an afternoon at the library, researching what others had learned about the adult woman presumed to have murdered her own child.

  THE ENOCH PRATT CENTRAL LIBRARY had been one of the places where her father brought her on Saturday afternoons, after the separation. That was the paradox of divorce in the sixties—fathers who had never much bothered with their children were suddenly expected to do things with them every other weekend. It was especially awkward in the Fallows family because Ric wanted to involve Annie in their outings and Lennie had expressly prohibited Annie’s participation. Ric defied his estranged wife, setting up fake chance encounters with his girlfriend. At the library, at the zoo, at Westview Cinemas, at the bowling alley on Route 40. Why, look who it is! You couldn’t even say he feigned surprise; it was more as if he feigned feigning. Annie, at least, had the grace to look embarrassed by their transparency. And nervous, with good reason. People were not comfortable with interracial couples in 1968 and not at all shy about expressing their objections.

  Cassandra liked Annie. Everyone liked Annie—except, of course, Cassandra’s mother, and it was hard to blame her for that. In fact, the outings were more fun when Annie was along because Annie didn’t give the impression that she felt debased by the things that a ten-year-old found pleasurable. Annie was only twenty-six, and a young twenty-six at that, but her interest in Cassandra was always maternal. She expected to be Cassandra’s stepmother long before anyone else thought this might be possible, including Ric. In his mind, he was having a great romance, and romance was not possible within a marriage.

  But Annie assumed she would be his wife. “She set her cap for him,” Cassandra’s mother said with great bitterness, and Cassandra had tried to imagine what such a cap looked like. A nurse’s hat? Something coquettish, with a bow? (She was the kind of ten-year-old who knew words like coquettish.) She imagined the hat that the cinematic Scarlett O’Hara lifted from Rhett Butler’s box, the girl in Hello, Dolly! who wanted to wear ribbons down her back, the mother in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, setting her jade green velvet hat at a jaunty angle. But Cassandra could not imagine round-faced Annie, who wore her hair in a close-cropped “natural,” in any kind of hat, much less see her as calculating.

  Annie had been literally thrown into her father’s arms, her dress torn, people ebbing and flowing around them. Then, even as Ric tried to help her out of the melee, he had been sucked in, with far more serious repercussions. “A riot is…an odd thing,” Annie had told Cassandra years later, when she was trying to re-create that scene for the first memoir. “Remember when Hurricane Agnes came through, and the stream flooded, and that man got out of his station wagon and saw it just float away, even as he stood there, holding on to a tree? It was like that, but the water was people, the wind was people. They didn’t know they were people anymore. Does that make sense?”

  Cassandra had thought it made perfect sense, and when the book was published, Annie’s passages were often the ones cited in the reviews. Yet Annie was the one person who would never speak to the press, no matter how much she was pursued. “I owed you my story,” she told her stepdaughter. “But I don’t owe it to anyone else.” Five years later—her words translated into twenty-eight languages, her likeness, in one of the frontispiece photos, having traveled to countries that Annie herself had never heard of—Annie was dead from ovarian cancer at the age of fifty-nine. Cassandra had worried her father would be one of those men who begin ailing upon their wife’s death, especially given that she was so much younger. But, while he had a thousand minor complaints, he remained robust. Too robust, according to the administration at the retirement community where he now lived. Cassandra was going to have to make nice with the director on her next visit there and she was dreading that visit. But for now, she had to go to the library.

  CASSANDRA HAD TO ENDURE a tedious explanation of how things worked—where to find the reels, how to load them, how to print, where to return the reels when finished—before she was allowed to take a spin on the microfiche machines. Orientation done, she began yanking out the drawers of boxed reels, feeling as if she were at the beginning of a scavenger hunt. Calliope’s life as a headline had coincided with the merger of the city’s last two newspapers, the Beacon and the Light, which meant there was only one newspaper to study, but it was still more than she had anticipated. Various Internet searches had narrowed down the year for Cassandra, but not the month of the precipitating incident, and the newspaper’s pay archive didn’t go back that far. She would have to start at January and trudge through all of 1988. But the snippet of film she had seen on CNN had clearly been from a cold, wintry month—there had been a bare tree in the background.

  It took her a while to establish an efficient yet comprehensive way of searching—checking the front page, then zipping ahead to the local section, pushing the machine full speed to the gap between editions and starting over. The smell and the movement made her nauseous. Should she have hired someone for this dreary task? But she had never paid anyone to do her own work. Besides, she liked immersing herself in microfiche, which she had used to research parts of her first book. She just wished she could recapture the giddy ignorance of those days, the joy in writing without expectation, the smallness of her daydreams.

  She found Calliope lurking at the end of March, which must have gone out like a lion that year. Yes, in fact, the weather was part of the story. February had been full of ice storms. At least, that was the excuse offered by a social worker, Marlee Dupont, charged with checking up on the child: Roads had been impassable, especially in Calliope’s West Baltimore neighborhood, always last to be plowed. The social worker had called, but the phone had been shut off. That explained why one month had gone by without a visit; the second month was never really explained. When the social worker finally did arrive at the apartment on Lemmon Street, all she found was Calliope.

  “Where’s your baby?” she asked, according to the article.

  “I can’t tell you,” Calliope said.

  It was, more or less, all she would say for the next seven years.

  When had the legal defense, the Fifth Amendment, first been introduced? It was hard to tell because reporters had come to the story from a distance, too, after much had happened. It wasn’t even clear why Callie was under the social worker’s supervision. Cassandra jumped ahead to the resolution, finding more detail in the stories about Callie’s release, almost seven years to the day later. She began jotting down a timeline in her Moleskine notebook. March 1988: Social worker discovers Calliope’s three-month-old baby is missing. So, working backward, December 1987: Calliope’s son Donntay is born. A previous child, also a boy, had been taken from Calli
e for neglect, but the department, citing her privacy rights, refused to say anything else, other than that this incident was not the reason a social worker had been assigned to Donntay upon his birth.

  A previous child had been taken. That detail had been missing from the television report, and it was given only scant attention here. Calliope’s parental rights had been terminated seven years earlier. That child would have to be—quick calculation—twenty-seven. How tantalizing. What had become of that child? Was that part of Callie’s story? Should it be? Cassandra had researched 1980s adoption as part of The Painted Garden and knew that various groups began pushing for greater openness in adoption in the nineties. But that wouldn’t affect Callie’s first son. He would be able to find his mother only if they signed up for a mutual registry.

  Images on microfiche tend to be grainy, especially when printed out, but Cassandra pressed the button anyway, capturing the 1988 photo of Callie when she was first jailed for contempt. Calliope’s face was hard, her eyes hollow, and the cords in her neck looked almost painful. Yet, even in a shapeless winter coat, there was the suggestion of a striking figure, a model’s figure. Drugs? Cassandra had heard somewhere that heroin users have killer bodies, that drug abuse gives them raging metabolisms that never stop, even if they clean up. Callie’s eyes were downcast in the photo, but her lawyer, holding her by the arm, looked straight into the camera. That was the woman who had yet to return Cassandra’s calls, an unanticipated development. These days, everyone returned Cassandra’s calls. True, she hadn’t been able to find anyone who would help her contact the retired police detective who had worked the case, but those people had at least had the courtesy and professionalism to pick up the phone.

  Studying the younger version of the lawyer, she found herself projecting all sorts of qualities on her. Bulldoggish. Homely. Cruel, but accurate. What was it like to be an ugly woman? Cassandra, like every woman she knew, was full of self-doubt about her own appearance, had several moments every day when she was disappointed by the face she saw in the mirror. The older she got, the more she felt that way. Yet she also knew, on some level, that she would never be described as ugly. What would that be like? Obviously, she wouldn’t enjoy it, although—this just occurred to her—physical attractiveness didn’t seem to have much to do with whether women were paired or single. The plain women she knew seemed to do better relationship-wise. There had been some faux-economic explanation of this recently, an appalling bit of pop journalism that had boiled down to the usual advice: You’re not getting any younger, so you better take what you can get.

  Cassandra, a two-time loser at matrimony, had no interest in getting back into the pool, especially after her second husband’s attempt to break their prenup. That was pure blackmail, and it had worked: She had given him more than he deserved in the hope that he wouldn’t gossip about her. She still liked men—she had a married lover, in fact, someone ideal, who required almost no attention—but she had no use for marriage. Her father was right: Marriage had nothing to do with romance. The end of her first marriage had been truly tragic—her college sweetheart, undone by demons he had hid all those years, destroying them both financially. The second one had been a mistake, plain and simple, and her account of it had been a cautionary tale that boiled down to this: If, on the eve of your wedding, you wonder if you are making a terrible mistake—you are.

  She inserted the 1995 reel, the one that held the story of Callie’s release, interested to see if the photo could reveal anything about the experience of seven years in jail. Funny, Callie was coming out of jail about the same time Cassandra started writing. In the second photograph, Callie actually looked better physically, but her expression was incredibly sad. To Cassandra’s eyes, this was not a woman who felt vindicated. But then—why would she? Callie, upon her release, was still a woman believed to have killed her child and to have evaded justice on what many would call a technicality, a trick.

  The homely lawyer was gone, replaced by a man. A strikingly handsome man. He seemed happy, at least—not out-and-out grinning, but allowing a tight smile that showed the hint of a dimple. Reginald Barr—the name was dimly familiar. Tisha had been Tisha Barr and she had a little brother, but he was known as Candy, in part because he was sweet, just a total charmer. But there was another, more peculiar reason for the name. The Reggie bar? No, that came much later. Candy’s nickname was from his signature dance, the way he imitated an obscure singing group.

  Cassandra’s mind, when it raced toward a stray memory, was like a horse heading for a fence. She either slammed into the limits of her own mind or sailed over, finding what she needed. But she knew this; it had come up in her first book. The Astors, another quartet of Temptations wannabes. She had watched them on some dance show—American Bandstand or Baltimore’s own Kirby Scott?—and her father couldn’t shut up about the name. “The Astors! The Astors! I wonder how much of the family fortune they inherited.”

  But there was a part where the singers simulated bees buzzing around the sweet girl’s head, and Candy Barr had turned that into a comic bit, slapping at the horde in mock terror. He also had a funny, hop-hop pelvis move, extremely precocious, a little nasty. Whenever he started doing that, Tisha chased him from the room. Gee-whiz …something, something.

  So Tisha’s brother had worked on Callie’s defense. It was the kind of small-world touch that Baltimore was known for, all the more likely in the tight-knit black community of the Northwest Side. Plus, that was pure Tisha, looking out for an old classmate, trying to save Callie once again. Cassandra knew exactly how to play it: She would let Reg lead her to Tisha, then allow Tisha to take her to—everyone. Because she was, after all, writing about them all, even if Callie was her focal point. She wouldn’t be too up-front about her interest in Callie, not at first, although she would keep trying to find that police detective. Gee-whiz, as the Astors sang. Have you seen our girl?

  CHAPTER

  6

  WHERE THE HELL IS BANROCK STATION?

  Teena Murphy put the box of chardonnay on the conveyor belt at Beltway Fine Wines, something she did—damn—every six days, on average, and it might have been a little more frequently, but she allowed herself vodka on the weekends. Yet this icy February day was the first time she had been moved to consider the name of her weeknight wine of choice. Box wine had many advantages—the price, the relative lightness of the carton, a key consideration for her—but Teena preferred it because she didn’t have to confront how quickly the level was dropping.

  “You having a party?” a voice behind her asked, a playful tenor. “How come I wasn’t invited?”

  She turned, surprised that anyone at Beltway Fine Wines would joke with her that way. Teena had been a knockout in her prime, but her prime was a long time ago. She had also let her hair go gray, which made her look older still, as did her small, fragile-seeming frame. People didn’t joke with slightly hunched, gray-haired ladies in the after-work rush at Beltway Fine Wines.

  Unless they knew you once upon a time.

  “Lenhardt,” she said. “What are you doing in my home away from home?” If she made the joke, it couldn’t be true. Right?

  Her former colleague laughed. He had aged, too, but then—it had been fifteen years, easy, since they had seen each other last. Teena still got invited to the Christmas parties, the retirement parties, even the homicide squad reunions, but she never attended. Her invitations may have arrived on the same paper, in the same envelopes as everyone else’s, but there was a whiff of pity about them. Pity and contempt.

  “You look good, Teenie,” he lied. Even in his wilder days, between his two marriages, Lenhardt had been able to compliment a woman without making it sound like a pass.

  “You, too,” she said, and it wasn’t as much of a reach. He looked as good as he ever had. Lenhardt—now in his fifties—had always been a little stocky, and there was only a touch of gray in his sandy hair.

  “Where you living these days?”

  “On Chumleigh, of
f York Road.” Quickly, defensively, always aware of the gossip that she had cashed in on her misfortune. “West of York Road. And it wasn’t so expensive when I bought in.”

  “Chumleigh!” He laughed at her blank look. “You don’t remember Tennessee Tuxedo? His walrus friend, Chumley? And Don Adams was the voice of the penguin? No? Ah well, as a Baltimore Countian, you’re one of the citizens I’m charged with protecting and serving, not necessarily in that order. You working?”

  “At Nordstrom.”

  “Explains the fancy duds. But then—you always liked clothes, Teenie. I remember—”

  “Yeah,” she said, not wanting him to finish the sentence: How excited you were when you got to join CID, wear your own clothes. She had dressed beautifully once she got out of uniform. It had been the eighties, not fashion’s finest hour in hindsight, and she had gone into credit-card debt for that outlandish wardrobe. It had been the age of fluffy excess—oversize shirts, big jewelry, riotous prints. She remembered one skirt with enormous cabbage roses. Oh, and those big Adrienne Vittadini sweaters, which someone of Teena’s height could practically wear as dresses.

  Her colleagues had teased her, saying she looked like a punk, not getting that the look was, in fact, a romantic take on the downtown look. She had even been called in, told to tone it down, but her union rep had stepped in and said her clothes were within the guidelines for dress. The department was used to fashion plates, but the male version, peacocks strutting in expensive suits and ties. The other women in homicide, all two of them, went for that boring dress-for-success thing, suits and little bows. Teena would have rather gone back to wearing a uniform.