The Proviso: Vignettes & Outtakes Read online

  Giselle remained silent.

  “I know you want friends at church, Giz,” he said finally, sighing. “But you’re not going to get them that way. As long as you have something they want, they’ll hate you for it.”

  “What do I have? I’m not pretty, I’m fat, I have ugly clothes and frizzy hair. I don’t play the piano, I don’t sing or dance. I go to East High School, Sebastian. Not Ray South. Not Truman. Not Raytown. East High School. Tell me what I have.”

  “Well, for a thirteen-year-old, you have a helluva bank account. You could get yourself some decent clothes.”

  She swallowed and looked away. “I don’t know where to go or what to buy.”

  “Call Victoria. She’ll help you.”

  Well, that was an idea. It wasn’t as if she lacked for cousins. The trick was finding one who could drive who had time to help her.

  “Okay, so I get new clothes, big deal.”

  Sebastian shot her a look. “You really don’t know, do you?”

  She stared at him until he looked down at what she held in her lap. She followed his gaze and saw the nine-millimeter in her hand.

  “Power, Giz. That’s what you’ve got. They can feel it but they don’t know what it is and apparently, you’re as ignorant as they are. If you want girlfriends, wait ’til you get to college, ’cuz those girls at church? Not worth having. Now, are you ready?”

  Giselle got out of the truck, stuffed her gun in her waistband, and fished a flashlight out of the glove compartment. Sebastian checked his own gun and stuffed it in the back of his jeans.

  “If I could fit into a pair of Jordache jeans, they’d be my friends.”

  “Yeah, and that’s the problem, right there,” Sebastian muttered as he retrieved his baseball bat from the bed of the truck.

  “Oh, hey. Mom has to be up at four to get to work.”

  “Shit. Well, we can’t be in a hurry, so if she catches you, too bad. We got money to make and I hear these fuckers have an ambush waiting for us. Whatever you do, don’t aim higher than the belt buckle.”

  Lost in her thoughts and approaching the gauntlet of PerkyPopularPretty, she ignored whatever Knox rambled on about and concentrated on how best to navigate it.

  But Knox stopped abruptly just in front of the door to the chapel’s overflow annex, his ear cocked toward it. He eased closer, nudging her with his body.

  “ . . . home with us for dinner?”

  “Did you ask him?” Giselle’s mother’s voice, razor sharp, even through the wooden door.

  “Yes, but he said he had to eat with his family on Sunday.”

  “Then why are you asking me?”

  “I thought if he had your permission to miss . . . ”

  Long silence, then Giselle heard her mother sigh. “Barbara, why do you think Knox would be interested in Susan? It’s not as if he can’t make up his own mind and his mind’s set on Giselle.”

  “Well, quite frankly, Lilly,” Susan’s mother returned, an edge of what Giselle might think was hatefulness coming from anybody else. “That girl of yours is terrifying.”

  “And yours isn’t. See a correlation?”

  Giselle didn’t feel terrifying at church and Susan seemed plenty terrifying to Giselle.

  The door burst open, nearly slamming Giselle and Knox in their faces. Her mother stood in front of them, her expression ferocious—almost as ferocious as the time she’d come home early from work and caught Giselle and Knox kissing.

  “Knox,” she barked. “Do you or do you not want to go to Sister Mendenhall’s house for dinner today?”

  Knox squirmed under her mother’s stern gaze, under the expectant stare of Sister Mendenhall. “Uh, not really,” he finally croaked.

  “Are you at all interested in asking Susan Mendenhall out?”

  Giselle glanced up at him. Susan was gorgeous. Giselle was not. In Giselle’s mind, it was an easy choice and she prepared herself for the blow.

  “No,” he said with a gulp, staring at Giselle’s mother, never looking at Sister Mendenhall or Susan, who had sidled up beside her mother.

  “All right. Go on into the chapel.”

  Knox jerked Giselle’s hand and made his way to the chapel doors as if stung, pulling her two steps before she found her feet—

  —then lost them again when Susan stuck her foot out and tripped her.

  Down she went, on her face, the back of her dress flying up to her waist, her bottom, covered by panties and pantyhose, exposed.

  She heard her mother’s gasp, felt her hands smooth her dress down to cover her and make her modest again.

  “You bitch,” Knox snarled, and gasps rose into the air like a fog and lingered near the ceiling before dissipating. Giselle felt his arms around her, lifting her to her knees, helping her to her feet.

  Giselle wanted nothing more than to run away, hide, cry. Away from her mother, Knox, Sebastian, Aunt Dianne and Uncle Charlie, her family.

  Oh, lovely. Sebastian had seen the whole thing, if his murderous expression was any indicator.

  She hated feeling—being—weak in front of her family and that only happened at church where the cult of PerkyPopularPretty reigned supreme. Her family knew it and it humiliated her that she became a completely different girl here at church where all she wanted was the acceptance she should have been able to expect.

  “Well,” Sebastian finally said. “If that’s an example of Christ’s teachings, I sure as shit don’t want to see an example of Satan’s.”

  “Dianne!” Sister Mendenhall gasped.

  Giselle’s mother, her hand caressing Giselle’s cheek, glared at Sister Mendenhall, catching Giselle’s tears with the pad of her thumb before they spilled.

  Giselle’s aunt ignored Sister Mendenhall’s outrage, rubbing Giselle’s back, between her shoulder blades the way she liked.

  Giselle’s uncle stalked away to catch Brother Mendenhall to give him a piece of his mind.

  Giselle’s cousin folded his arms across his chest as he stared at Susan until she squirmed.

  Giselle’s boyfriend since before she could remember wrapped her in his arms.

  “C’mon, Giselle,” Knox murmured. “Let’s go home.”

  She got stuffed in the cab of Sebastian’s truck, squeezed between the two of them, the gear shift between her knees. With the ease of a long partnership, she shifted when Sebastian clutched. None of them said a word, but Knox draped his arm across her shoulder and pulled her to him, kissing her temple.

  “I hate girls,” she whispered. “Power, my ass.”

  Sebastian patted her knee.

  And she still didn’t know what necking and petting were.

  ATLAS SHRUGGED

  January, 1985

  Sebastian: 18

  “I will not have that book in my house!”

  “But, Dad—”

  “I gave it to him, Charles,” came the stern voice of Sebastian’s mother, who emerged from the kitchen to find out what had set Sebastian’s father off on one of his weird kicks. He had a lot of those. “He needs to know something other than—” She gestured around at the immaculate but broken down living room. “This.”

  “Oh, don’t you start with me, Dianne.”

  “Don’t you start with me,” she shot back. “I want something better for my son. I want him to understand that living in poverty is not a virtue.”

  Sebastian sighed and looked down at the thick paperback his father had pitched across the room. Old, dog-eared, highlighted, marked, written on, the edges with tiny teeth marks where mice had nibbled. He could go get it; his father wouldn’t slug him or anything. But there was that underlying respect there that made him hesitate.

  “Having something while other people have less isn’t a virtue, either.”

  “We have to take care of ourselves first!”

  Sebastian didn’t know whether he was expected to stick around and hear this argument for the four hundredth time, but he certainly didn’t want to. He wondered if it was too soon to sl
ip out of the room without being noticed or if he’d have to wait another five minutes.

  “Taking care of ourselves means taking care of others.”

  “The people you ‘take care of’ bleed us dry, Charles. They’re moochers. I don’t know if you’re overly generous or just a mark, but there is no value in sending good money in to chase after bad. We have to eat. We have to have a good roof over our heads. We have to have dependable transportation. Giving everything away doesn’t help us.”

  “That’s not what Christ taught!”

  Sebastian rolled his eyes . . . There it was. The last bastion of an indefensible stance his father knew was indefensible somewhere deep down in his soul. It always got pulled out early in the argument because he had no other support for his feelings.

  “Christ didn’t teach poverty for poverty’s sake. He didn’t teach that we should give everything away to the detriment of our own lives.”

  The fight turned again, as always, into a loudly-voiced theological survey of the value of having money versus not having money. His mother would win intellectually, but would lose practically and, as his mother blocked the threshold of the stairs and his father blocked the door to the outside, Sebastian plopped himself down on the couch to wait out the storm and lost himself in thought.

  About what had happened to Giz Sunday at church.

  The girl needed some female support, that was for sure. All the Vogue and Cosmopolitan and Harper’s Bazaar in the world wouldn’t help her get where she wanted to go. Neither would her mother, who was as ignorant of fashion as she was and, worse, ridiculed it. Sebastian’s mother would be no help; she’d chastise Giselle for wanting to spend her money on anything but citrus futures.

  On the other hand, once Giselle had evolved from duckling to swan, she wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of fending off the predators who’d take advantage of her naïveté and willingness to trust.

  Just like the girls at church.

  Giselle was good with a gun, good with the street crowd, good at school. Confident, poised, with just enough humor to keep situations from exploding. She made friends of her enemies and drew people to her. Give her a straight-on fight and she’d win every time—but allow the back door of her psyche to creak open and let in the mists and shadows of deception and coquetry and flattery, the hopes of acceptance and the stirrings of hormones to be used as weapons against her and she had no chance.

  In Sebastian’s opinion, it was best she stay ugly for a while, her sexual discovery carefully shepherded by the boy who was as invested in staying chaste until marriage as she.

  “There are no poor general authorities!”

  That snapped Sebastian out of his musings. That was new, fresh, and different—and he was disappointed in his mother for using it.

  His mother ranted on, twisting the knife. “Tell me something, Charlie. If poverty is such a virtue, why doesn’t the Lord call poor men to be general authorities? Or stake presidents? Or bishops? Poor men don’t get leadership positions in the church, Charlie. Tell me why that is.”

  Sebastian knew why. Poor men didn’t have the financial resources or the types of jobs that would allow them to fulfill such demanding positions in the church. Being a bishop was a full-time job in and of itself. No man who wasn’t at least middle management could pull that off and still pay the mortgage.

  He’d heard once that other protestant religions paid their clergy and their musicians and their secretaries and most every other position they had to fill to make their churches run, which Sebastian found utterly inconceivable. Getting paid to serve the Lord?

  Ridiculous.

  “ . . . bad example, Charlie! You want to be bishop? Quit giving everything we have away. Keep some of it, invest it, make more, be smart about making more, not work so hard for so little reward. How can anyone who can’t manage to pay his bills be an example to others?”

  “We pay our bills,” Sebastian’s father growled, hurt, furious, that she’d used his greatest disappointment against him. Sebastian almost flinched.

  “Barely!”

  Well, in practice, “barely” was a lie, but his father didn’t know that, didn’t need to know it. For the purposes of the argument and his father’s reality, it was the absolute truth and had always been.

  “We’re not in debt.”

  “Barely!”

  Again, a lie, but his mother fought with weapons of greatest effect and didn’t give away her secrets to be used against her.

  His father said nothing for a long while, his barrel chest heaving. Finally, “I don’t want him reading trash like that.”

  “Trash” that Sebastian had already read. Several times, which he hadn’t had a chance to tell his mother before his father had intervened.

  “There’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “It goes against everything the church teaches.”

  Mmmm, not really. It was just a different spin on the parable of the—

  “Oh, hey,” his mother said, in a falsely bright tone that irked his father to no end. “Let’s re-read the parable of the talents, shall we?”

  His father’s color dropped. Ah, so he’d forgotten—intentionally or not—Christ’s financial commentary.

  “Answer the question, Charlie. Why are there no poor general authorities?”

  Charlie Taight coveted a bishopric; he always had and he would’ve been good at it. Sebastian certainly didn’t want to be a bishop’s son, but he didn’t have to worry about it as long as his father refused to own more than anyone else in the neighborhood.

  Sebastian sighed and arose from the couch. No matter what, he was getting out of here. He had debts to collect tonight and he couldn’t stand that the only thing his parents ever fought about was having versus having not.

  25 TO LIFE

  June 8, 1994

  “On the first count of murder in the first degree, how does the jury find?”

  “Not guilty.”

  I stared at the table, my vision too fuzzy to read the words on the paper in front of me. I could feel my heart pound in my chest so hard and fast I wondered if I was having a heart attack.

  At twenty-five.

  “ . . . second count of murder in the first degree, how does the jury find?”

  “Not guilty.”

  My stomach heaved, like the mass of people in the gallery behind me who stood and screamed and roared.

  Rage.

  Me.

  Them.

  All of us.

  The pounding of the gavel echoed in the courtroom, echoed in my head. I felt a big hand on my shoulder. It squeezed comfort, but it wasn’t enough.

  “ORDER IN THE COURT! BAILIFF!”

  Still I sat as the crowd surged toward the man at the table across the imaginary aisle from me. I didn’t dare look at him because I knew what I’d see: Smug arrogance.

  My vision focused enough for me to read one line of the list I couldn’t stop staring at.

  LaVon Whittaker

  One of the defendant’s lovers.

  Simone Whittaker.

  LaVon’s thirteen-year-old daughter.

  I suspected LaVon knew more about the defendant’s hobby than she’d admitted to, but it wouldn’t matter to him; it never did. He’d killed them when he was done with them, every last one. LaVon Whittaker wouldn’t die tonight, but someone on this list would. Just as soon as the next seventeen verdicts were read and the defendant was released.

  “CLEAR THE COURTROOM!”

  I vaguely wondered if Nocek had fixed this case behind my back somehow. Sheriff Raines. He might have done it, taken the evidence, but I wasn’t sure he was that smart. I also wasn’t sure if Nocek was stupid enough to sabotage a case that, if won, would reflect well on him enough that he wouldn’t have to stuff so many ballot boxes. I really couldn’t be sure, but I would have preferred to believe Nocek had sabotaged me than to believe . . . a mistake.

  Just a small, stupid mistake.

  And not mine.

 
That big hand left my shoulder as the people in the gallery were herded outside like cows to slaughter, protesting all the way. A small, soft hand grazed across my back and then that, too, left me. No, Sebastian, Giselle! Don’t go, please don’t go! I need you with me.

  The courtroom doors thudded closed.

  Other than the jury and the bailiffs, there were only four people in the room: the judge, the defendant, the defendant’s lawyer, and . . . me.

  Alone.

  Having failed to get justice for the nineteen women and girls who had spent the last year crawling out of their graves into my nightmares—if I had the audacity to sleep—to beg me to give it to them.

  Having failed to keep another slew of people safe.

  One of the women or girls on the list in front of me would die tonight. The rest would follow her, one by one, until he was stopped.

  Again.

  And it would be my fault.

  “ . . . third count . . . ”

  “Not guilty.”

  Jamie McElroy.

  “ . . . fourth count . . . ”

  “Not guilty.”

  Anita Sterling

  “ . . . fifth count . . . ”

  “Not guilty.”

  Susanna Chase.

  “ . . . sixth count . . . ”

  “Not guilty.”

  Valerie Nottingham.

  “ . . . seventh count . . . ”

  “Not guilty.”

  Penny Hendricks.

  “ . . . eighth count . . . ”

  “Not guilty.”

  Christy Madison.

  “ . . . ninth count . . . ”

  “Not guilty.”

  Sharon Gentry.

  “ . . . tenth count . . . ”

  “Not guilty.”

  Charlene Lawrence.

  “ . . . eleventh count . . . ”

  “Not guilty.”

  Allison Martino.

  “ . . . twelfth count . . . ”

  “Not guilty.”

  Cindy Trusdale.

  “ . . . thirteenth count . . . ”

  “Not guilty.”

  Gabriela Jorge.