One of Us Read online

  I start to tell him to keep his hands off my mother, but before I can get the words out all of their faces begin to melt then become the shifting images of a hologram: his face is my face; my mother’s face is his mother’s face; Molly’s face is the face of a strangled boy; Fiona’s face is the face of the Devil.

  I try to run but my ankles are wrapped in heavy chains. My wrists are, too.

  “Hello, Danny,” a soothing voice says behind me.

  I turn and find a man in a red suit. His hands are clasped in front of him and he smiles sadly at me.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “Why I’m Walker Dawes.”

  He unfolds his hands like the spreading of a fleshy bird’s wings and reveals to me the blood-slick head of an unborn infant.

  Vomit rises in my throat.

  He opens his mouth to speak to me again and my father’s voice says, “Go get me a beer.”

  I jerk awake with such force that I shake the entire couch and hit the end table. A lamp goes crashing onto the floor.

  I let out a shout. My ears are ringing with the sound of my heart banging. I fell asleep in my clothes again and my shirt is drenched in sweat.

  I wait for either my mom or Tommy to appear. We brought Mom home yesterday and installed her back in her childhood bedroom. It’s directly above me.

  Nothing happens.

  I take deep breaths until I feel like I can stand. It’s still dark outside but dawn will break soon.

  I get a dish towel and drape it over Fiona’s face, then return to the kitchen to make some coffee.

  While listening to the drip and gurgle of Tommy’s pot I settle down on the couch and open the box containing the files for my most pressing case, hoping to distract my thoughts and calm me down. It’s the death of Baby Trusty at the hands of his mother, Mindy Renee Trusty, a cute student from an upper-middle-class family who loves Gossip Girl, skinny jeans, and pineapple on her pizza, and is shaping up to be, in my opinion, one of the most cold-blooded killers I’ve ever met.

  I put aside all the materials from the DA’s office: medical records, witness statements, autopsy reports, psychiatric reports by no fewer than six defense experts; then my own voluminous notes from interviewing her family, friends, neighbors, teachers, classmates, former boyfriends, and Mindy herself. I stop when I get to the folder containing her MMPI, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the most widely administered standardized psychological test.

  She finished the 366 questions in record time, only looking up from her scratching pencil every now and then to complain about the fact that she was missing a yoga class and to glare at her cell phone, which I had confiscated, turned off, and left in plain view on the table in order to watch her reaction.

  I scored her test that same night. There were no significant clinical elevations in the curve, no signs of mental illness, depression, or any type of thought disorder. Her profile showed her to be absolutely normal, yet she had given birth to a baby alone in a bathtub in a hotel room less than three months earlier, cut the umbilical cord with scissors she had brought with her, stuffed loose change down the baby’s throat until he suffocated, cleaned up the mess, put the baby’s body into a plastic bag provided by the hotel for overnight dry cleaning, and put him in the trunk of her car with the intention of driving to her grandparents’ farm near Lancaster and burying him somewhere in the woods. She might have gotten away with all of it if she hadn’t passed out from dehydration and exhaustion and wrecked her car. No one had known she was pregnant; she had gone to great lengths to conceal her condition.

  Her defense team is putting forth the all-purpose standby excuse for crimes that seem otherwise unimaginable; she snapped.

  The problem with this argument is that no matter what certain attorneys, the media, and pop culture like to insist, mental illness doesn’t work this way. People don’t just snap. Any criminal—whether sane or insane—is a long time in the making and exhibits many signs throughout his or her life of impending danger for anyone who chooses to notice.

  Traditionally, infanticide cases are rarely even prosecuted, and when they do go to trial, they are the single most successful use of the insanity defense. It seems incomprehensible to a jury that any mother would willfully kill her own child.

  Being mentally ill is an easy explanation to accept when someone does something this awful. People prefer it over the only other available explanation, which is what I’m going to present to them in this case: Mindy Renee is a monster.

  My own mother is one of the few women in this country who has been convicted and sent to prison for killing her own child, and if ever there was a woman who was obviously mentally ill and should have been acquitted, it was her. But she was a victim of circumstance, time, place, economics, and a fact of the case no one was able to overlook for even a moment: there was no other conceivable suspect.

  Random lunatics didn’t break into people’s homes in the country, kill an infant, and bury her in her own backyard, and my father had an unassailable alibi; he was in a coal mine when Molly went missing.

  The circumstantial evidence against my mother was overwhelming, but even so, Tommy never believed she did it. At the time I did my best to be on his side and defend my mom, but my support was halfhearted. I wasn’t convinced, even though a few things didn’t make sense to me.

  I was there when my mom first realized Molly was gone. I had just come home from school and Mom was lying on the couch taking her nap while Molly was taking her nap in her crib.

  Mom greeted me and asked me about my day, then took my hand and we walked upstairs together.

  I’ll never forget her screams or the terror on her face as she flew wildly around the little room I shared with my newborn sister, throwing herself on the floor and looking under the crib, slamming open the closet door, my toy-box lid, the dresser drawers, running to the window and pressing her forehead against the glass with a sob.

  If she had killed Molly and buried her in our backyard where Dad found her body later that night, why would her shock and anguish have been so real? If she was acting, who was she acting for? Me? I was five years old.

  I knew Mom did strange things, sometimes dangerous things, yet I also knew her actions were never motivated by anger toward others. She would have never purposely harmed someone.

  I knew how much she loved Molly. I saw how she smiled at her and heard her sing the same lullabies to her that she sang to me. She held my little hand in hers and helped me gently stroke Molly’s tiny arms and legs and talked about all the fun things we were going to do together. If she had hurt Molly it would have been an accident, and her first response would have been to get help for her. It would have never occurred to her that she should try to cover it up. She didn’t think that way.

  My mother could tell the most fantastic stories involving her ongoing delusions that were completely untrue, yet at the same time she was incapable of telling a lie.

  I told all of this to Rafe when he took my statement. I was sure he believed me, but like me he also believed my mom was crazy and by definition, crazy people did crazy things. They were completely unreliable. They were always doing stuff that was out of character.

  I’ve since spent my entire adult life discovering just the opposite is true: the mentally ill are the most predictable people in the world.

  Mom never stopped denying that she killed Molly, but to the jury, it was painfully obvious that she had killed her. This fact wasn’t being questioned. Why had she done it? What had led to this horrible tragedy? These are the answers they wanted to hear.

  Over the years, people may have whispered to each other behind closed doors that Arlene McNab was crazy, but no one ever knew this for sure, and even if we had known, nothing would have been different. Our family could have never afforded treatment for her and we wouldn’t have wanted her to get any. In a coal town in the 1970s, psych
iatry was only for the truly crazy, and crazy was nothing more than a catchall term for the weak who couldn’t cope. In a culture where a boy blowing off his fingers with butane and blasting caps was considered to be a whiner if he asked to go to the hospital, a woman claiming she couldn’t get out of bed to make dinner because she was depressed wasn’t going to be met with much sympathy.

  Yet at the trial she desperately needed a psychologist to say she suffered from manic depression, but Dad and Tommy still couldn’t afford one. They also couldn’t afford a competent attorney.

  I didn’t attend the trial. Tommy felt any sympathy the jury might feel for my mom would be outweighed by the damage the experience might do to me, plus he thought the ploy could backfire and the jury might want to protect me from my mom instead of return her to me. I guess my dad agreed with him.

  The public defender assigned to Mom’s case also pointed out that if he were to put me on the stand for the purpose of saying nice things about Mom, this would mean the prosecutor would also get a chance to talk to me, and he would ask questions that would make my mom appear to be exactly the kind of violent, unstable woman who might kill her baby.

  It was the only smart move Mom’s lawyer made, and any good that might have come of it was overshadowed by his crucial error of putting Mom on the stand, where she said over and over again that she didn’t kill her baby.

  This insistence sank her insanity defense. Everyone had already decided she had done it. All that was left was to decide if she deserved leniency because she was ill, and the jury made up of hardscrabble blue-collar cynics believed there was nothing saner than telling a bald-faced lie to save your own skin.

  I leave Mindy’s MMPI in the box. I can’t work. I need to get out of this house. This place has always been my safe haven, but it’s also filled with bad memories. As a child I rarely slept here without having a nightmare, and now it seems the same thing is happening again.

  I pass on the coffee. I eat a banana and go out for a run.

  I don’t pay any attention to my route. I know all the roads and I’m not worried about getting lost, but today this works against me as I get too absorbed in my flight and trying to survive the cold. I come to an unpaved road I haven’t taken before. I know I should turn back and head for home. My eyes sting from the cold; the icy air burns my lungs; my hands, face, and feet are numb.

  This new route is no different from any other back road around here. The hard-packed surface of mud and gravel glimmers with patches of ice. It’s heavily wooded on both sides. This time of day the bare tree branches are starkly black against the iron-gray sky and I’m struck by the macabre thought that the coal-rich land has been stabbed again and again, spurting its lifeblood into the frigid air where it hangs frozen.

  As I’m cresting a hill I hear the rumble of trucks and see lights below blazing against the indigo wall of the predawn hills. The massive piles of slag, the ebony sparkle of coal tumbling off a loader into the back of a truck, the double-wide trailer that serves as an office, the dark yawning entrance to the four-foot-high tunnel sunk eight hundred feet into the side of a mountain: I didn’t know there were any operating coal mines left near Lost Creek.

  I hear a truck coming up behind me. I turn and make out a pickup behind the glaring headlights and prepare myself for some abuse.

  The truck slows as I expected and the passenger-side window rolls down.

  “You looking for a job? Sorry but we’re not hiring.”

  The voice is female and taunting and vaguely familiar. I move closer and find Brenna Kelly behind the wheel.

  “It’s a joke,” she explains.

  I don’t know what to say.

  “Anyone ever call you a fanatic?” she asks.

  “Are you referring to the running?”

  “You’ve got to be crazy to be out on a day like this. Get in. I’ll take you down to the office and get you some hot coffee then drive you home.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “Get in,” she repeats.

  The tone of her voice is commanding but not domineering. There’s a gentleness to it that makes me think she knows what’s best for me. I’m tired. I do what she wants.

  A group of men in coveralls and hard hats stand outside the trailer stomping their feet in steel-toed safety shoes and blowing into their cupped hands to keep warm. They greet Brenna with grunts and nods.

  “You find yourself a hitchhiker, Lou?” one of the men asks her and the rest respond with smiles they try to hide by bowing their heads.

  “Just a man in need of a cup of coffee,” she replies.

  “I don’t know what you heard, mister, but Lou’s coffee ain’t that good. Sure as hell not worth coming all the way out here to get it.”

  They all laugh at this.

  “Lou?” I ask her.

  “It’s a nickname.”

  “She’s an army lieutenant,” one of the other men provides.

  “Not anymore.”

  “Six tours,” he says.

  “Now I’m an accountant,” she tells me.

  “An accountant who can shoot you between the eyes from three hundred feet away.”

  More laughter. She smiles back at them. I decide to smile, too.

  “This is Danny Doyle,” she introduces me. “Tommy McNab’s grandson.”

  At the mention of Tommy’s name, they all quiet down and stand a little straighter out of respect. I’m glad she didn’t introduce me as Owen Doyle’s son.

  A tall, lanky man with a gray beard steps forward.

  “How’s Tommy doing?” he asks me.

  “He’s fine.”

  “He was sick, right?”

  “Pneumonia. But he made a full recovery.”

  “There ain’t nothing can kill Tommy. ’Cept time.”

  The rest of the miners nod their agreement.

  “This is my brother, Carl,” Brenna says gesturing to the man who just spoke, “and this is Ricky, another one of my brothers.”

  One of the other men steps forward. He’s not quite as old or tall as Carl and he’s a little meatier, but the family resemblance is obvious.

  He shakes my hand. I’m relieved when I get it back.

  “And this is J. C., Todd, Jamie, and Shawn. Is Tim around?”

  “He won’t be back till this afternoon. He’s checking out that new generator.”

  “Right,” she says.

  She leads me into the trailer. The men silently watch us go. I assume they’re going to make fun of me as soon as I’m out of earshot.

  The office is deliciously warm. The circulation begins to return to my face and extremities and they burn. My muscles are starting to cramp up but there’s nothing I can do. I’m not going to stretch and I refuse to sit down and then have Brenna watch me try to get to my feet later groaning and wincing like an old man.

  “I wasn’t aware that there were any mines still operating around here,” I comment.

  “There’s just this one and another one out near Coulter. They’re small. We only employ forty men. They’re prized jobs, believe me.”

  “So you work for Walker Dawes?”

  “Technically, yes, through a complicated financial and legal arrangement that’s pretty common in the industry now. Tim Franklin operates it, but his company is a subsidiary of Lost Creek Coal. Tim bought the rights to the coal cheap in a tax sale from another company. Dawes is into a lot of fracking now. And clean coal.”

  “Clean coal,” I interject. “Mention it to Tommy and he spends the rest of the day saying things like, ‘How’d you like a plate of dry water?’ or, ‘Maybe you’d like me to hit you in the head with this nice soft rock?’”

  She smiles while taking off her coat and gloves.

  “I know a lot of guys who feel that way, but they’d never turn down the work. Jobs are jobs.”

 
; “How’s this mine doing?” I ask.

  “Like most mines this size. It’s profitable only if everything goes absolutely right, which is hardly ever. The next two shifts have to fill forty trucks or we’re out of business.”

  “Is that a lot?”

  “One twenty-by-twenty-foot cut fills three trucks.”

  She sees that I have no idea what she’s talking about, but I’m flattered that she thought I might.

  “It’s a lot because we lost a couple hours yesterday. A problem with the generator. No generator, no fan. No fan, no air. Every hour of downtime costs about two grand.”

  She brings me a cup of coffee and walks back to her desk. I wish she would have stayed a moment longer. She smells good: a clean floral soapy scent combined with cinnamon and ginger. I remember Moira said she likes to cook. Maybe she has nightmares. A lot of veterans do. Did she wake up screaming, too, and bake a pie before coming to work?

  “Thank you,” I say. “Six tours of duty. Were you in Iraq?”

  “That’s one of the places.”

  She cocks her head to one side and eyes me critically.

  “You look like you’re thinking about giving me your business card so I can call you if I ever shoot up a shopping mall and want to use PTSD as an excuse.”

  “That’s the kind of thing I could help you with, but I’m not thinking that.”

  “So Tommy’s feeling better. Is that why you’re here? To see how he’s doing?”

  “It’s been a while since I’ve been back and I thought it was time.”

  I drink my coffee while she goes about getting folders out of a filing cabinet.

  “I’ve never seen Rafe and Moira together,” I say, attempting to fill the silence, “but from what I’ve heard, there’s more bad blood between them than between him and Glynnis.”

  “You know how that goes. Glynnis got over the divorce but Moira never will. Sometimes it’s easier to get over someone wronging you than it is to get over someone wronging someone you love.”