HASTINGS: And the father was still beside the window?
DANFORTH: Yes, he was sitting in the chair there, holding his baby in his arms. He was looking down at him, and Anne was right beside him--kneeling on the floor. From where they were they could see there was a body on the bed, but I know they couldn't see the ... the incision, and I was glad. I thought it would have been too painful for them to have seen it. I don't recall actually turning out the light by the bed when I was through, but I looked at my notebooks the other day and I saw that I had.
Stephen immediately tried to clarify what she meant, asking, "You mean your medical notebooks, correct?" but it was too late.
"No," my mother answered slowly, her voice meek with shock. She knew instantly what she had done, and she knew what would happen. "My personal notebooks. My diary."
There was no dramatic rumble or murmur in the courtroom, because we were all too stunned to speak. All except Bill Tanner.
With a voice that sounded almost ebullient, he asked the judge if he could approach the bench, and then he and his deputy and Stephen and Peter all congregated before Judge Dorset. In my row, my father, my grandmother, Patty, and the two law clerks stared straight ahead in silence, trying to keep their emotions inside them. But I knew what they were feeling. Everyone in the courtroom knew what they were feeling, because everyone in the courtroom knew what this meant. Even if, like me, they didn't know exactly what the law was or what exactly would happen next, they all knew that my mother had just announced to the prosecution that there existed notebooks they had never seen that might have a direct--and devastating--bearing on her case.
. . .
This is the law: In the discovery process in the state of Vermont, Stephen Hastings was under no obligation to inform Bill Tanner that my mother's personal notebooks existed, or to turn them over to the prosecution.
This is the fact: My mother had told Stephen soon after they met that the notebooks existed, and he had read some of them--at least some of them, maybe whole years' worth. When he saw that some of the entries from mid-March could be construed as incriminating, he told her to stop keeping what was in essence a personal diary, and to never speak of the diary again until after the trial. She said she would abide by both requests, and then ignored both--one by design, and one by accident. My mother was simply incapable of not keeping a diary. She had kept one throughout her entire adult life, and it was probably unrealistic to expect her to stop chronicling her actions and emotions in the midst of the worst stress she would ever experience.
And so the State had seen the medical records and charts my mother kept on her patients--the prenatal forms, patient histories, obstetric examination reports--but not what she referred to as her notebooks.
The four attorneys and the court reporter huddled around Judge Dorset in a bench conference that lasted eighteen minutes. The clock in the courtroom read eleven twenty-nine when Bill Tanner stood and eleven forty-seven when the four men returned to their tables and the court reporter sat back down at her desk.
When it had become clear to the judge that the discussion would last more than a few moments, he had had the jury escorted from the room for the duration of the debate. But no one thought to offer my mother the chance to return to her own seat, and so she was forced to sit alone in the witness box the whole time as if she were cornered in a classroom in a dunce cap. Usually she stared into the courtroom or up at the chandelier without expression, her chin cupped in her hand, but she did glance once at our family and offer us a hint of a smile. This sure smarts, doesn't it? that hint of a smile said, and in my head I heard her voice saying exactly those words to me, recalling the time years earlier when I'd been standing on one of the picnic table benches in our backyard and slipped off, and banged my elbow on the table itself.
"This sure smarts, doesn't it?" she had murmured, rubbing the skin that would soon bruise with two fingers.
When Stephen returned to his table, he looked glum. It was a short walk from the bench to his seat, but in even those few steps it was clear he had lost for the moment his one-click-above swagger.
The judge scribbled a note to himself before informing us of his decision, and then spoke in a combination of legalese for the lawyers' benefit and layman's terms for the rest of us. Apparently during the conference Tanner had demanded that my mother produce her notebooks so the State could see what was in them. Stephen had argued that they weren't relevant to the event itself, and there was no medical detail in them that mattered. But Tanner insisted that it was, after all, my mother who had brought them up, and she had brought them up to corroborate her own testimony. And so Judge Dorset ruled that he wanted all of the notebooks from March forward in his hands by the end of the lunch break. The trial would be recessed until he had inspected them himself in camera--in his chambers.
"I will decide what, if anything, is relevant," he concluded.
He then told us all that the jury would be brought back into the courtroom and that my mother would complete her direct testimony; when she was finished, we would adjourn until he had reviewed the notebooks.
"Your Honor, a moment, please," Stephen said, and the judge nodded. Stephen then motioned for Patty to join Peter Grinnell and him at their table. The three of them whispered briefly together, and then Stephen asked to approach my mother. Again the judge nodded, and Stephen walked quickly to my mother and asked her a question none of us could hear.
But we all heard her response, and I began to realize what would happen next.
"They're right behind my desk," my mother said. "They're on a bookcase, on the lowest shelf."
Did I know exactly at that moment what I would do? I don't believe so; the idea was only beginning to form. But with merely a vague notion, I still knew what the first step had to be.
My father, my grandmother, and I were separated from the defense table by a link of black velvet rope--the sort of barrier that often cordons off bedrooms in historic homes. For the first and only time during that trial I leaned forward off my seat on the bench, half-squatting, and I tapped Peter Grinnell on the back of his shoulder.
When he turned to me I whispered, "Look, if you need any help, I'll go with you. I know right where they are."
Stephen still had to finish eliciting from my mother her direct testimony, and so Peter stayed with him in the courtroom. It was Patty Dunlevy who was sent to Reddington to get the notebooks.
I went with the investigator, on some level astonished that I was sitting in the front passenger seat of her sleek little car. I told myself that I had not yet committed to anything, I was not yet a criminal; I was still, in the eyes of everyone around me, merely going to my house with Patty Dunlevy to show her where my mother's notebooks were kept so we could bring them back to the courthouse as the judge had requested.
Yet there I was, trying to disregard the way my head was filled with the sound of my beating heart, focusing solely on what I had read late into the night the Wednesday before. I tried to remember which dates were the most incriminating, which entries were most likely to be--as the lawyers and the judge euphemistically phrased it--relevant.
The trees along the road were growing bare by then, a small sign to me of the way the world went about its business while we were squirreled away in a courtroom.
I thought of the far worse captivity that loomed before my mother.
"How are you holding up?" Patty asked, her voice suggesting a maternal inclination I hadn't imagined existed in her.
"Fine," I told her, practicing in my head what I would say when we arrived at my house: Why don't you wait here, and I'll run inside and get them.
"What just happened happens all the time. Try not to worry. A trial like this always has some chaos," she went on.
"Uh-huh." As I recalled, there were probably three loose-leaf binders that would matter to Judge Dorset: The March entries were toward the end of one notebook; early April through August were in a second; and August through September formed the beginning o
f a third. Those were the notebooks I would need to bring back to the courthouse.
"In the end, this will just be a ... a little footnote to this whole affair," she said.
I nodded. Why don't you wait here, and I'll go find them. Don't worry, I can carry them.
She asked, "You hungry?"
"Nope." I figured I would have at least five minutes before Patty would begin to wonder what I was doing. I couldn't tell if she was the sort who would follow me into the house to help if I didn't return quickly.
"I am. Isn't that unbelievable?"
Fortunately, when my mother had begun keeping her notebooks years earlier, she had chosen to use three-ring binders and loose-leaf paper. Moreover, at some point she had gotten into the habit of beginning each entry on a separate sheet.
"I don't think I could eat anything," I told her. I would definitely remove the March 15 entry, because I knew there was another one on the sixteenth that also talked about Charlotte Bedford's death. I'd have to check to be sure, but I thought there was a chance it was on the sixteenth that my mother wrote about where Asa had been holding the baby and where Anne had been sitting. And there were those entries further on in the summer, the ones in late July and August and even September, where the doubts in her mind had become so pronounced that they were no longer doubts: She was almost certain she had killed Charlotte Bedford.
Those entries would have to go, too.
"Well, after we've given Dorset the notebooks, I'm going to have to steal away and get something to eat."
I nodded.
"Any idea what sort of things your mom wrote in her diaries?"
"She's never shown them to me," I told her.
I think initially Patty was going to keep her car running while I ran inside our house, but I heard her turn off the engine while I fumbled with my key in the front door.
I had to go to the bathroom, but I didn't dare take the time then. I went straight to my mother's office and found the three notebooks the judge would expect, and laid them out upon my mother's desk in a row. I would move chronologically forward from March.
For a second I considered flipping through the pages with my fingertips wrapped in Kleenex, but then I remembered the pages were already covered with my fingerprints from the week before. And so I decided I would only bother with tissue when I pressed down hard on the metal tabs at the top and the bottom of the binder that would release the key pages.
Tom had offered to go with us, but I was glad I'd said no. I felt bad enough about what I was doing; I wouldn't have wanted to involve anyone else.
I was shaking as I worked, a precursor of sorts to the trembling I'd experience while we awaited the verdict. I wasn't sure what law I was breaking, but I knew what I was doing was illegal. And I knew what I was doing was wrong.
When I returned to Patty's car I was still shuddering. I dropped the three notebooks onto the floor below the glove compartment and pushed them to the side with my feet as I climbed in. Five loose sheets of paper, folded down to the size of a paperback book, were pressed flat against my stomach, hidden under my blouse and my sweater and my jacket.
"Is that everything?" Patty asked, glancing down at the notebooks on the floor mat.
"That's everything," I said, the first of at least three times I can recall that I told that particular lie.
By the time we returned, my mother had completed her testimony and the court had recessed. Before taking the binders with him into his chambers, the judge told us he would let us know by one-thirty or two whether we could all go home for the day or whether the trial would resume midafternoon. If we were told to go home, it meant he was probably going to allow some or all of the notebooks, and Stephen and Bill Tanner would be granted a day to examine the entries; if we were asked to remain, it meant the judge had decided nothing in the notebooks was relevant and the State would not be allowed to see them.
Stephen was prepared to lose: He was prepared to lose both on the specific issue of the notebooks, and I think he was prepared to lose the case. He knew what my mother had written in March and--perhaps--early April: He probably knew that it only got worse.
And I think my mother was ready for defeat as well. I didn't believe at the time that my mother had slipped on the stand with the conscious hope that it would ensure a conviction--and even today I don't think she hoped for one on an unconscious level--but I think she had become resigned to that inevitability. Given the guilt in her own mind, she must have viewed her notebooks as all the evidence the State needed to convince the jury she had killed a woman in labor.
The difference in my mother's and Stephen's attitudes, if there really was one, is that Stephen still had some fight left in him. He was prepared to appeal a decision that allowed any part of the notebooks as evidence, and he was already modifying his strategy for his expert witnesses: It didn't matter whether Sibyl Danforth thought Charlotte Bedford was dead or alive, because Sibyl was merely a midwife. Our obstetric experts and forensic pathologists were positive, based on their years and years of medical experience, that the woman was dead by the time my mother made her first cut.
The principal issue he would have to overcome was my mother's testimony itself. Carefully he had elicited from her the idea that she had done everything she could to see whether Charlotte Bedford was dead, without ever having her say categorically that she was sure beyond doubt that the woman had died. That part of the transcript has become for me a small study in legal ethics:
HASTINGS: Did you check one last time to see if the woman had a pulse?
DANFORTH: Yes.
HASTINGS: Did you hear one?
DANFORTH: No.
HASTINGS: Did you check one last time to see if she had a heartbeat?
DANFORTH: Yes, absolutely.
HASTINGS: And did you hear one?
DANFORTH: No, I did not.
HASTINGS: You did everything possible to make sure the woman was dead?
DANFORTH: Oh, yes.
My mother hadn't lied, but if the notebooks were allowed, it would look to the jury as if she had, and not even Stephen Hastings's experts would be able to restore her credibility.
Consequently, our lunch was an extremely quiet affair, and even Patty Dunlevy was subdued while we awaited Judge Dorset's ruling. Occasionally my father or Stephen would try and bolster my mother's spirits as they had in the days immediately before the trial started, and once or twice Peter Grinnell tried to include Tom--who, despite everything else on her mind, my mother had somehow remembered to invite to lunch--in the conversation by asking him about school. But most of the time everyone sat around the wooden restaurant table in silence.
While the fears of the adults around me began and ended with the issue of whether Judge Dorset would allow the notebooks to be admitted as evidence, I had an additional worry as we ascended the stairs to the third-story courtroom to hear the judge's ruling. I was afraid he had discovered that pages were missing, and in a voice filled with fury and disgust he would ask Stephen or me what we had done with them. Throughout lunch and as we walked back to the courthouse, I had been sure that everyone around me heard the papers rustling beneath my clothes every time that I moved, and I was convinced the moment the judge saw me that he would be able to tell I was responsible.
When I'd gone to the bathroom at the restaurant, I'd considered ripping the pages to shreds and flushing them down the toilet, but I was afraid: If the judge discovered they were missing and insisted that they be presented, their continued existence might be my only hope for clemency. But as we wandered near the ladies' room at the courthouse, the idea crossed my mind once more to destroy them, and I told my parents I had to go to the bathroom and I would catch up with them in the courtroom in a minute.
Tom asked me if I was feeling okay, and I told him I was fine.
In the courthouse bathroom, however, I was again unable to bring myself to dispose of the notebook pages, although this time it was not merely a fear of the judge that prevented me. At some point,
I assumed, my mother would get her notebooks back: Although it was unlikely I could ever press the folds from the pages and replace them in the diaries before she noticed they were missing, at the very least I could still return them to her. Someday, I imagined, she would forgive me for reading them--especially, I reasoned, if by some miracle she was acquitted.
But I did read the pages once more in that bathroom, and as I did I reassured myself that I was making the correct decision: I had to do everything I could to protect my mother and preserve our family.
Besides, my mother's conviction would not bring back Charlotte Bedford. It would merely destroy a second woman.
The jury was not present when Judge Dorset issued his ruling, but most of the spectators had reassembled.
None of us, of course, could see Stephen's or my mother's expressions when he spoke, but I assume if the spectators envisioned anything at all on their faces, they envisioned only relief: The judge ruled that there was nothing in the diaries that was relevant to my mother's testimony specifically, or to the case in general. The notebooks were a personal account of her life but had little relevance to the issues under examination and would therefore not be shared with the State.