Chapter 5
In Camera
Judge Eleanor Whitcomb-Rhodes read the motion on a Thursday, over a tuna sandwich she did not finish, and decided to do something that satisfied nobody.
"I will review the records myself," she said from the bench on the twenty-sixth of September. "In camera. Privately. I will read what Lakeview has, and then I will decide, line by line, what the defense may see. Ms. Lenoir, you'll tell Ms. Bellamy that it is not a denial."
"I'll tell her, Your Honor."
"And Mr. Crane."
"Your Honor."
"You will not be pleased by the timeline. I read slowly." She took off her glasses. She was sixty-three, a heavyset woman with a gentle drawl and a reputation for sentences that took a long time to be understood, and she had never in thirty years reversed herself in open court. "The records will be delivered to my chambers. I would like them sealed. I would like them in a box that I can lock. I do not want them in the newspaper."
"No one wants that," said Hollis Crane, courteously.
"Good. Then we understand each other."
It was a sensible ruling. Corinne understood that, sitting in the second row with her mother's hand around hers. It was exactly the ruling she would have written herself. It was careful, and fair, and designed to protect her.
It would take eleven weeks.
The delay was not the judge's fault. It was the nature of paper.
Lakeview Behavioral Health had changed its name in 2016, then merged with a hospital group in Nashville, and had moved its old records to a storage facility in Marietta which flooded in the spring of 2018. Most of the files had been scanned. Some had not. A clerk in a basement spent three weeks looking for a chart that had been misfiled under Bellamy, Carolyn, which was another girl, born the same year, with the same ward.
In the meantime, Dr. Iris Okonkwo got a letter.
She was fifty-nine now. She had retired from Lakeview two years before and kept a small private practice in a converted bungalow in Decatur, where she saw eleven patients a week and grew tomatoes on the porch. The letter was from the Pruitt County court. It said that she was being asked to produce all clinical notes, session records, and personal materials relating to Corinne A. Bellamy, DOB 08/17/1995, and that her failure to do so would be treated as contempt.
She read it standing at the kitchen counter. She read it a second time sitting down.
Then she took off her reading glasses, and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, and thought about a girl of seventeen in a green cardigan, sitting with her back very straight in a blue plastic chair, saying in a polite voice: I'm not sure it's safe to stop counting.
She remembered that session. She remembered it because it had been the first time the girl had told her anything true.
Do I have to? she thought. Do I have to give them that?
She did not. She would not be required to turn over her personal notes, which were privileged. But the girl's notebook, the little black-and-white composition book, which she had asked her to keep, and which the girl had left in her office on the day of discharge, and which Iris Okonkwo had never been able to throw away, was a different matter. It had never belonged to her. It had belonged to Corinne.
And Corinne had, three weeks earlier, in the district attorney's office, in a voice that did not shake, told her lawyer that she wanted it produced.
It's mine, she had said. I'd rather give it to the judge than have somebody else describe it.
Iris Okonkwo found the notebook in a file box in her attic, in a plastic bag, with a Post-it that said DO NOT SHRED in her own handwriting. She sat on the attic floor, among the Christmas ornaments and the dead husband's golf clubs, and read the first page.
Day 1. I counted the ceiling tiles. There are 48. Dr. Okonkwo says that I can write whatever I want, and she won't read it unless I tell her to. I'd like to put down that I am not crazy. I'd like it on the record. I'm only sad in a way that doesn't have a name yet.
She closed it. She cried for a few minutes. Then she put it in an envelope and wrote on the front, in careful capitals, FOR JUDGE WHITCOMB-RHODES — IN CAMERA — CONFIDENTIAL, and drove to the post office before she could change her mind.
By Thanksgiving, small things had begun to change.
It was not a collapse. Nothing so clean. It was more like a house settling. A door that had closed easily would catch at the frame. A drawer that had slid would stick.
Ada was the first.
She had been wonderful, in the first month. She had slept on a mat on the floor of Corinne's bedroom for three weeks. She had cooked, in the strange gloomy industrial way she cooked when she was frightened, enormous pots of rice and beans that lasted four days. She had driven her to every appointment. She had sat in the second row at the hearing with her hair in a purple cap, her hand on Corinne's knee.
Then, one night in November, she came home late and stood in the doorway of the kitchen with her car keys in her hand.
"My dad called," she said.
"Is he okay?"
"He's fine. He wants me to come to Houston for Christmas. For the whole break." She did not look up. "He said he's been reading about the case. He said some of the stuff in the paper. About the, about you. Being in the hospital."
"Ada."
"I told him that doesn't matter."
"Okay."
"I told him it doesn't matter. I said that. I said it twice."
"I know you did."
"It's just that he's a deacon, Corrie. He's got a whole church. And somebody in the congregation is married to Owen Maddox's cousin, and they've been, they say people talk." Ada's voice had gone high and thin. "I'm not saying I believe them. I'd never. I'm saying he asked me whether I'm sure. And I said yes. And he said, how can you be sure?"
Corinne was standing at the counter with a dish towel. She put it down.
"What did you say?"
"I said because I know you."
"That's good."
"But it was a question," said Ada. "He asked me a question. And I thought, why did I have to answer it? Why does it have to be me who's sure?"
There was a long silence. The streetlight outside blinked, amber, once. Eight, nine.
"You don't," said Corinne gently. "You don't have to be sure."
"I am sure."
"Then you don't have to say it."
"Corrie—"
"It's okay." She could hear her own voice, level and kind, as if it belonged to a person in the next room. "Go to Houston. Go see your dad. It's been a really long fall."
Ada burst into tears, and Corinne held her, standing in the kitchen of the rented house on Dellwood Street with her hands on her friend's shoulders, and thought: This is what it looks like. Not a door slamming. A door that was open a little less every day.
She did not count, that night. It was the first time in months. She stood in the dark and listened to Ada cry, and she noticed, with a small inward flinch, that she was perfectly calm.
On the fourteenth of December, the judge released her ruling.
It ran to nine pages. It was, in the opinion of the Calloway Ledger, a model of judicial restraint.
Judge Whitcomb-Rhodes held that the complainant's treatment history at age seventeen was of limited probative value and highly prejudicial, and that the vast majority of the Lakeview records were to remain sealed. However, because the complainant had herself voluntarily produced a personal notebook kept during her hospitalization, and because that notebook contained statements bearing directly on the complainant's perception of time and memory, the court found that the notebook must be made available to both parties. It would be admissible, subject to a limiting instruction, for the sole purpose of assessing the reliability of the complainant's recollection.
For the sole purpose.
"What does that mean?" said Ruth, in the hallway of the courthouse.
"It means," said Marcia Lenoir, who looked a good deal older than she had in August, "that the jury will be told they can read what you wrote when you were seventeen for one reason, and one reason only. To decide whether to believe you."
"That's not a limit," said Corinne. "That's a map."
Lenoir looked at her.
"Yes," she said. "I'm afraid it is."
She took out a peppermint, and unwrapped it, and held it in her fingers. Down the hall, in the doorway of the conference room, Hollis Crane was standing with his briefcase and his silver hair, talking quietly to a young associate in a charcoal suit. He glanced up as they passed. He gave Corinne a small, grave, sympathetic nod, the nod of a man at a funeral who has not known the deceased very well but has come anyway out of respect.
It was, she would think, the loveliest piece of acting she had ever seen.
At the end of the corridor, by the water fountain, a man was leaning against the wall in a leather jacket, with his hands in his pockets and his head down, waiting for something. He was tall and broad and had a scar on his chin. He looked up as she came near.
It was her brother.
"Wes," she said. "What are you doing here?"
"I came to see how it went."
"You said you were working."
"I took the day." He pushed himself off the wall. His knuckles, she noticed, were scabbed, three of them, across the back of the right hand. They had been clean on Sunday. "It went okay?"
"What did you do to your hand?"
"Nothing."
"Wesley."
"There was a guy at the Shell on Route 9." He shrugged. "It's nothing. I'll tell you later."
"Which guy?"
"Corrie."
"Which guy, Wes?"
Her brother looked at her. He had their father's eyes, the same dark restless ones, set a little too deep, and he had never been good at lying to her, because he had never really tried.
"Maddox," he said. "Owen. He was getting gas. He said something."
"What did he say?"
"It doesn't matter."
"What did he say?"
"He said," said Wes Bellamy, in a voice that cost him, "that he hoped you'd figure out what you remember."
The water fountain hummed. At the far end of the corridor, a door opened, and Hollis Crane's associate stepped out, looked left and right, and, seeing Corinne's brother, went back inside as if he had forgotten something.
"Oh, Wes," said Corinne softly. "What have you done?"
It would be eleven days before they knew. It would be a Tuesday in the week after Christmas, in the family room at the house in Calloway, with the tree still up, that a deputy sheriff would come to the door with a warrant for assault, and her brother, who was twenty-seven and had never before been arrested, would hold out both wrists to be cuffed, and say, to the man in the doorway, quietly, almost politely:
"Dale. I wondered if it'd be you."