Chapter 25
The Arrest
The first officer to reach the pier was a Tybee Island patrolman named Kowalski. He was twenty-four and had been on the force nineteen months. He came down the boards at a run with his hand on his holster, and stopped ten feet from the end, and saw a woman sitting on the planks with a dead man's head in her lap.
"Ma'am," he said. "Ma'am. Put your hands where I can see them."
She lifted her hands.
They were red to the wrists. She held them palm out, quite steady, in the morning light.
"The gun is behind me," she said. "To my right. About two feet. It's a Taurus nine-millimetre. The safety is on. I shot this man once, in the chest, at twelve-oh-six this morning. No. Seven-oh-six. I'm sorry. I'm very tired." She drew a breath. "My name is Corinne Bellamy. I'm not going to resist. There's a federal agent coming. I'd like you to wait for him, if you can."
"Ma'am, I need you to get on the ground."
"I'm already on it."
He stared at her. He was a big, pink, serious young man with a wedding ring and a name tag that had slipped crooked. He looked at the body. He looked at the bandage trailing from her arm. He looked, for a long moment, at the small grey phone lying on the dead man's chest.
"Is that evidence?"
"Yes."
"Don't touch it."
"I won't," said Corinne. "Please don't either. It's the most important thing I own."
He cuffed her.
He did it carefully. He knelt, and took her wrists one at a time, and said, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, is that too tight, and she said it was fine. The click was small and neat. It was a sound she had heard a hundred times in other people's trials, from the witness chair, from the gallery. She had never once imagined what it would feel like. It felt like nothing. It felt like a door closing in a house at the other end of the street.
By eight o'clock there were fourteen vehicles on the pier road.
Ames came at twenty past.
He did not run. She saw him get out of the grey sedan at the foot of the pier, a tall, stooped, tired man in a rumpled raincoat, and stand for a long moment with one hand on the roof, looking along the boards. Then he came on at a steady walk, with Dana Prescott a pace behind him. Neither of them spoke to the officers. The officers made way.
He stopped in front of her.
She was sitting on the bench by then, under a foil blanket somebody had given her, with a paramedic cutting away what was left of her bandage. She looked up. He looked down. They regarded one another with a kind of exhausted courtesy, like two people who have been writing letters for years and are meeting at last on a railway platform.
"Ms. Bellamy."
"Agent Ames."
"You're bleeding."
"It's a through-and-through. It's not as bad as it looks."
"That's what people always say," said Ames, "just before they faint." He turned to the paramedic. "Is she fit to be moved?"
"She needs a hospital."
"Then she'll go to a hospital." He crouched, slowly, with a small grunt, until his eyes were level with hers. "I'm going to read you something. You know what it is. I'd like you to listen to all of it. And I'd like you to say nothing until I'm finished. Can you do that?"
"Yes."
"You have the right to remain silent."
He said it low and plain. He did not hurry, and he did not dramatise. He said every word. When he came to an attorney, he stopped, and said, "Do you understand?" and she said, "Yes," and he went on. At the end he said, "With those rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?"
"Yes."
"You don't have to."
"I know."
"I'd advise you to wait for a lawyer."
"I called one," said Corinne. "At six. From the car. Nate Feldman. He's on the road from Atlanta. He told me not to say a word to anyone." She smiled very faintly. "I'm sorry. I'm going to say a lot of words. But I wanted you to know that I was told."
Ames let out a long breath through his nose.
"Ms. Bellamy," he said. "I've been in this work thirty-one years. And I've never once had a suspect tell me she was ignoring her counsel politely."
"I'd like to give you the phones first."
"The phones."
"There are two. This one has a recording of Dale Sutter coming into my kitchen on Saturday night, at twelve-nine, with a gun. The other is Caleb Moss's. It has the video. It's eleven minutes and four seconds long. Please don't watch it in the car."
He looked at her.
"Why not?"
"Because you'll want to stop," said Corinne. "And you must not stop. You must watch every second. Preferably sitting down, with someone else in the room."
"That's a very specific instruction."
"I know. I'm sorry. I've listened to it only once. I'm afraid I'll never be able to again."
He took the grey phone from the officer's glove. He held it a moment in his palm. His large, creased, careful face did not change. But something went through it, very briefly, like the shadow of a wing on water.
"Prescott," he said.
"Sir."
"Bag this."
"Yes, sir."
"And get the other from Ms. Bellamy's pocket. Both of them go in my car. Not the evidence van. Mine." He stood, with a click of his knees. "Nobody opens them but me."
They kept her at Memorial Health in Savannah for two days.
She did not sleep. She lay in a narrow bed on the fourth floor, in a paper gown, with her left wrist cuffed to the rail and an IV in her right, and watched the ceiling tiles. A deputy sat outside the door. A second deputy sat in a chair by the window, reading a magazine about boats. Neither spoke to her. They were not unkind. They looked at her, when they thought she was not watching, the way people look at an animal that has escaped from a zoo and been found, unhurt, in the garden.
The surgeon who cleaned her arm was a small brisk woman with grey braids. She said, "You're lucky." Corinne said, "People keep saying that." The surgeon said, "People are right." She sewed. She did not ask what had happened.
On the second night, at a quarter past eleven, the television on the wall, which had been muted, caught her eye.
She read the captions.
GEORGIA WOMAN CHARGED IN FIVE KILLINGS.
BODY OF DEPUTY FOUND IN KITCHEN OF PRUITT COUNTY HOME.
HICKORY RUN CLUB LINKED TO ALLEGED COVER-UP, SAYS GBI.
She sat up.
A reporter she did not know was standing in front of a courthouse. Behind her, in the light of a camera, a tall, thin, grey-haired man was walking down the steps with a briefcase in each hand and a face like carved wood. She knew him. It was Wendell Haines, the district attorney. He was not talking. Three men in dark suits had him by the elbows.
The caption beneath him said: DA IN CUSTODY.
She put her hand over her mouth.
They watched it, she thought.
Ames watched it. And he did something with it.
"Is that real?" she said aloud.
The deputy by the window looked up from his boats.
"Ma'am?"
"That. On the television."
He glanced at it. He shrugged, uncomfortable. "Yeah. They arrested him this afternoon. And a, a Mr. Brannock. The old sheriff. And Mr. Pruitt Senior." He cleared his throat. "They're saying it's, I mean, they're saying a lot of things. I don't know."
"Judge Tillman?"
"I think so."
"Hollis Crane?"
"Ma'am, I really shouldn't."
"Please."
He looked at her. He was a freckled man in his forties with a wedding ring, a tired mouth, and, she saw, a small silver cross on a chain at his throat. He looked at the cuffed wrist and the thin, hollow face. And she saw him decide.
"All of 'em," he said quietly. "All five of the old men. As of about four o'clock."
She did not say anything.
She lay back. She stared at the ceiling. A long, trembling breath went out of her, as if she had been holding it for five years and had at last been permitted to let go.
It worked.
Not the way I planned. Not the way I wanted. But the lantern's out.
She thought of Caleb, with the cap under his head.
It was worth it.
She hated herself for thinking it.
She went on thinking it, in the long hours before dawn, turning it over like a coin. It was worth it. It was not worth it. He was a boy. He held the door. He carried me. The sentences would not settle. They kept sliding past each other, like boats in a fog.
At two in the morning she began to cry again, silently, with her face turned to the wall.
The deputy by the window put down his magazine, and stood, and moved his chair a few feet farther off, so that she should have the room.
On the fourth day they moved her to the Pruitt County jail.
It was the same one. She had not expected that. She had assumed they would keep her in Savannah, or send her to the women's facility at Pulaski. But the crimes had been committed in Pruitt, and Pruitt was where they would be tried, and the new district attorney, a visiting prosecutor from the attorney general's office, had asked for her to be held in the county.
It was a low, flat, yellow-brick building at the back of the courthouse square. She had walked past it a thousand times. She had never gone in. It had a smell she had not anticipated: floor cleaner, boiled cabbage, and underneath, faintly and appallingly, wet concrete. They took her to a room with a bench and a drain. A matron with a soft, cracked voice said, "Take everything off, honey. I'll look the other way." She did. She stood in an orange jumpsuit two sizes too large, with her hair in a plait and her bare feet on the cold floor, while a Polaroid camera whirred.
The matron looked at the picture.
"You don't look like it," she said.
"Like what?"
"Like what they say."
"What do they say?"
"That you're, I mean. Five." The matron coloured. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't. It's just, you look like my niece. She works in a bank."
"I used to want to be a lawyer."
"Did you?"
"Yes."
"That's nice," said the matron, helplessly. She put the photograph in a folder. "Come on, hon. You're in C-block. You'll have it to yourself. They said, for your own safety."
For my own safety.
She followed her down a green corridor. She counted the doors. There were fourteen. At the fifth, a small voice, from behind the wire, whispered, that's her. At the ninth, someone began to sing, softly, in a high clear alto, a hymn. It was Abide With Me. She knew it. It had been sung at Ruth's funeral.
She kept walking.
At the end of the block was a cell with a steel bunk, a steel toilet, a steel sink, and a high narrow window. The window faced west. Through its wire she could see a rectangle of sky and the top of one tree.
It was the water oak.
She laughed, once, harshly. The matron looked at her.
"Sorry. It's, I know that tree."
"It's the only one in the yard."
"I used to sit under it. At lunch. When I was at Calloway High." She shook her head. "Funny."
"Isn't it," said the matron, and locked the door.
Nate Feldman came on the Friday.
They put them in a narrow room with a glass partition and a telephone. He sat on the other side with a legal pad in front of him and his tie loosened. He looked ten years older than he had in September. There were shadows under his eyes the colour of tea. He had a small cut on his chin where he had shaved without looking.
He picked up the phone. So did she.
"You said you'd say nothing," he said.
"I said some."
"You said everything. Eleven hours. I read the transcript on the plane. Ames wrote it up himself. He didn't leave out a word." He rubbed his eyes. "You told him about the gun. You told him about the dock. You told him, you told him, you stopped at Owen's counting. Corinne. You counted aloud."
"I wanted it accurate."
"It's a confession to five murders."
"It's a record."
"They're not the same thing!"
"They are," said Corinne, "if you're doing it right."
He stared at her through the glass. For a long moment he said nothing. Then, slowly, he laughed. It was a defeated sound, half sob and half something else. He put the pad down.
"I came here to tell you to plead," he said. "I've been rehearsing it since Atlanta. I was going to say that there's no case. That the video and the recording and the ballistics and your own statement make it impossible. That they'll put you on death row in eighteen months whether you fight or not. That the only thing I can do is bargain for life, and maybe get you thirty years in a decent facility with a library."
"And?"
"And I looked at you just now, and I can't say it."
"Why not?"
"Because you'll say no."
"I will."
"Why?"
She looked at the glass. She looked at her own reflection in it, faint and ghostly over his face. A pale narrow woman in an orange suit, with a cropped fringe and eyes like two dark holes.
"Because I've been in a courtroom," she said. "Twice. Once as a witness, and once as a ghost. And both times, nobody said what happened. They said alleged. They said the complainant. They said a consensual encounter. And a man got to stand up and tell the world that it was nothing, and a judge nodded, and the record went into a box."
"This is a different court."
"It's the same room."
"It isn't."
"It's the same room, Nate." She leaned in. "I'm going to sit in it again. Not as a witness. As the one they're trying. And this time I'm going to make them say it. Every word. Every single one. I'm going to make the State of Georgia read into the record what was done to me, before it can send me to the chair."
"The chair," said Nate quietly, "is the needle, now."
"I know."
"You could die."
"I know." She almost smiled. "I've been counting that for a long time."
He closed his eyes.
"Corinne."
"Yes."
"I need to ask you something. And I need you to tell me the truth. Not for the record. For me."
"Ask."
"Do you think you did right?"
It was the question. She had known it was coming. She had known it since the pier, since the kitchen, since the long black hour in the Piggly Wiggly lot with the dish towel soaking in her fist. She had even rehearsed an answer. It had been a good one: balanced, grave, honest, with a pause in the middle.
She put it aside.
"I don't know if it was right," she said.
His eyes opened.
"I know it was not mine to choose. They chose it for me, Nate. They chose it the day every door in that building shut in my face. I said here is the evidence for four years, and it came to nothing. So no. I'm not sorry. I would do it again." She swallowed. "And I know how that sounds. But a woman is not supposed to have to be this brave. She is supposed to be able to go home. The only thing I'll carry is the pier. I counted him out. I held his head. He said thank you. That's grief, not regret. It's mine."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only honest one I have."
He looked at her for a very long time. Then he picked up his pen, slowly, and wrote something on the top of the pad, and underlined it twice.
She craned.
It said: NOT GUILTY BY REASON OF.
And then he crossed it out.
"No," said Nate. "No. You'd hate that, wouldn't you."
"I would."
"You'd rather be guilty and have it said than innocent and have it hidden."
"Yes."
"God help me," said Nate Feldman. "I'm going to try to give you that."
She was arraigned on the eleventh of September, in the courtroom she knew.
It was the same. The same oak rail. The same dark panelling. The same high windows, with the same dust drifting in the same bars of light. She came in through the side door in her orange suit, with her hands in front of her, in chains. She did not look at the gallery. She did not look at the empty chair at the defendants' table where Grant Pruitt Jr. had once sat. She looked straight at the bench.
It was not Judge Whitcomb-Rhodes.
It was a man she did not know, a heavy, bald, dignified Black judge in his sixties named Alvin Okafor, brought in from Macon because every judge in Pruitt County had been recused. He looked at her over his half-glasses. He read the charges. He read them slowly. There were five.
Count One: the murder of Owen Maddox.
Count Two: the murder of Grant Pruitt Jr.
Count Three: the murder of Terrence Boyle.
Count Four: the murder of Dale Sutter.
Count Five: the murder of Caleb Moss.
When he reached the fifth, he stopped. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Then he put them back on.
"Ms. Bellamy," he said. "How do you plead?"
She stood.
She had thought about this, too. She had considered a dozen forms of words. She had considered silence. But as she stood in the courtroom, with her chains clinking and the old dust turning slowly in the light, she found that she did not need any of them.
"Not guilty, Your Honor."
A murmur ran through the gallery.
"To all five counts?"
"To the charge as it is written." Her voice was clear and steady and carried to the back of the room. "I did the acts. I won't deny them. But the word murder is a word that says what a person meant. And I would like a jury of twelve people to decide what I meant. I'd like them to hear all of it first."
Judge Okafor looked at her.
Then, with great deliberation, he nodded.
"The plea of not guilty is entered," he said. "The State has given notice that it will seek the death penalty." He paused. "Ms. Bellamy, do you understand what that means?"
"Yes, Your Honor."
"Do you wish to say anything further?"
She looked at the high windows. A bar of light lay across the table. In it, one mote of dust, very bright, was turning over and over, slowly, as if it could not decide where to settle.
"Only that I'd like a pad," said Corinne. "And a pencil. In the cell. If it's permitted."
"For what purpose?"
"I was going to be a lawyer," she said. "I'd like to keep my own notes."