“If by that you mean, ‘Whom did I tell?’ the answer is no one.”
“I wasn’t accusing you, Kelly. I’m just trying to think this through.”
Kelly looked down at the desk. There was something she had never shared with the judge, preferring to shoulder the pain on her own. She had dealt with it, condemned herself for what she had done, and then willed herself to forget about it and move on.
“I was pregnant,” Kelly said. She swallowed, her voice suddenly thick. “I took the RU-486 pill five weeks later.”
She glanced up at the judge and saw nothing but sympathy on his face. She tried to continue, stopped, pulled herself together, and started again. “I went to a clinic and got a prescription. They guided me through the process and had me return to the clinic the day the abortion occurred for some counseling and observation.” She blew out a deep breath. “I expelled the fetus at home. But half a dozen people at the clinic probably know.”
Saying it out loud brought back a rush of emotions and images. At the time, Kelly had worked hard not to think about the implications, knowing she would probably talk herself out of what she felt she had to do. She took the initial dose of RU-486 at the clinic and suffered through a few hours of nausea, headache, and fatigue. For the next forty-eight hours, she walked around like a zombie, trying not to focus on what she had done.
She took the Cytotec pill at home and a few hours later began to dilate. According to the information she had read, the fetus would be tiny at this stage, about half an inch or so. She made it a point not to look before she flushed the toilet.
She was businesslike when she returned to the clinic for observation. But she fell apart when she returned to her apartment, sobbing deep into the night. Just before dawn, emotionally exhausted and weak with grief, she had finally collapsed into a fitful sleep.
Weeks later, she couldn’t keep herself from researching fetal development. She’d even looked at a few pictures on the Internet. At five weeks old, tiny arm and leg buds would have been formed. The baby’s tiny heart would have been beating. The image of the fetus was burned into her mind.
“I’m so sorry,” Judge Shaver said. “I had no idea.”
He got up from his chair and walked over to close his office door. Then he sat down again and handed Kelly some Kleenex.
“I just wanted to deal with it on my own,” Kelly said. “I wanted to get my life back on track.”
She pressed her lips together and held back the tears, watching the recognition dawn on the judge’s face. This wasn’t just his and Kelly’s word against the world. Somewhere there was proof that Kelly had been pregnant.
Kelly had spent the last few days wondering how he would react. Would he question whether the baby was his? be angry at her for not telling him? go immediately into damage-control mode?
She saw none of those calculations in his eyes. Just an overwhelming sadness and an almost palpable sense of sympathy.
“I can’t believe you had to go through that alone,” Judge Shaver said. He paused, searching for words. “I can’t change the past, Kelly. I wish I could… but I can’t do anything about that. The thing I can do is keep you from suffering any more. It’s not too late to withdraw my name.”
She appreciated the offer, but he wasn’t thinking this through. “That won’t really change anything, Judge. If the press gets hold of this, they’ll still run the story to explain why you withdrew. The coverage might not be as intense, but it would be out there just the same. My statements to the FBI have already been made. Everyone we care about would be hurt. Your family. My family.”
Judge Shaver nodded solemnly. She was right, and he knew it.
For a second, Kelly was struck with the irony of it-this man who had so mesmerized her with his Solomonic wisdom a few years ago now seemed so overwhelmed. It was amazing how love-or was it just passion?-had destroyed her objectivity and neutered her common sense.
For Kelly’s part, she had steeled herself for whatever lay ahead. A part of her just wanted this whole thing out in the open-the secrets that haunted her finally revealed. Maybe on the other side of humiliation she would find liberation. But the thought of disappointing everyone who mattered most held her back.
“I need to play this out a little,” Kelly said, trying to sound more confident than she really was. “Dance with this guy for a while. See if he makes a mistake. Maybe I can represent my client zealously and still figure out who Luthor is before the case goes to trial.”
Shaver looked skeptical. “There’s a lot at risk here,” he said.
“Tell me about it.”
47
Before she left her condo Friday morning, Kelly checked the Kryptonite blog one last time. Though her blackmailer’s threat had been very specific-exposure of her affair only if she settled the case-she still couldn’t keep from obsessively monitoring the site.
The blog seemed to consolidate everything evil about the Internet in one URL. For starters, it was a vicious rumor site, populated by sordid stories attributed to unnamed sources. The comments were smarmy and full of vulgarity. It was basically a place to verbally tar and feather defenseless public figures based on either pure speculation or the flimsiest evidence imaginable.
Kelly breathed a sigh of relief every time she checked the latest post and saw that it wasn’t about her. Her fears were compounded by what she had learned in the past few months about the public-relations aspects of gun control. The mainstream media would be her ally. The “intellectual elites,” as the right-wingers called them, generally believed that the country’s fascination with guns was unhealthy, that its frontier mentality was a bad thing. Civilized countries, like those model democracies in Europe, solved their disputes with clever editorials and dueling political philosophies, not guns at high noon.
But the “flyover zones” were filled with rabid gun enthusiasts. Many of the ordinary folks in battleground states lost all sense of objectivity when the government made noises about controlling firearms. Kelly had already seen a little of that fury in the e-mails she had received and the letters to the editor that mentioned her name. If word about her affair ever hit the press, she would be red meat for a pack of Second Amendment wolves.
The fickle media would probably abandon her as well. She would be like a pup-tent camper in the middle of a hurricane, exposed to its destructive fury with nowhere to turn.
Today’s Kryptonite story, thankfully, was about the latest political sex scandal. In the few days she had been checking the blog, Kelly had noticed a definite pattern. Political stories focused on sex and corruption. For movie stars, the stories were about sex and drugs. For rock stars, who were expected to be stoned and promiscuous, Kryptonite trotted out the really bizarre accusations, accompanied by unflattering photos of the stars looking either bulimic or severely overweight.
And then the “fans” would crucify them.
The common denominator to all the stories was sex. It wasn’t lost on Kelly that her escapade with Judge Shaver certainly fit the profile.
Kelly read a few comments, said a prayer of thanks that it wasn’t her turn yet, and started to get ready for work. The gossip rag sheets could wait. Today would be the crucial deposition of Jarrod Beeson.
Beeson’s deposition started at 1 p.m. in a dingy conference room in the Patrick Henry Correctional Unit near Martinsville, Virginia. The site was a minimum security facility that housed about 150 inmates. It was classified in the Virginia system as Level 1 High Security, not a country-club prison but also a far cry from the types of places where violent felons served long stretches.
Because of the difficulties associated with having Beeson transported to Virginia Beach for the trial, Kelly and Jason had agreed that this would be a de bene esse deposition, meaning it could be used at trial in lieu of Beeson himself appearing.
Kelly knew that Beeson would be dressed in an orange jumpsuit and look like a felon, so she had ordered only a court reporter and not a videographer. That way, the deposition would be read to the jury, but they wouldn’t be watching a static head shot of a guilty-looking Beeson on videotape. Unfortunately, Jason Noble had anticipated this move and paid for his own videographer, determined to show Jarrod to the Virginia Beach jury.
