The Night Visitors(54)

I look over at Alice and see she’s leaning forward, her brow furrowed. I wonder if she’s put two and two together. The great seal of New York is the image on the button she found in the crawl space. I slip my hand in my pocket and rub the rough metal surface—

“Hands where I can see ’em!” Davis barks.

I take my hand out and lay both hands flat on the desk.

“At first I thought, snore, what could be more boring than a bunch of old court cases—and they are old. They date all the way back to the early seventies. They’re all juvie cases, all tried by your father, the Honorable Matthew T. Lane, and guess what? Your daddy found every one of them guilty!”

“He adjudicated them delinquent,” I automatically correct. “There’s no guilty verdict in juvenile court.”

Davis sits back and makes an O with his mouth. “Well, la-di-da, look who knows her legalese. Why didn’t you follow your daddy’s footsteps into the law?”

“I didn’t have the best experience with the legal system,” I say.

Davis grins. “No, you didn’t! Your own father adjudicated you a delinquent for . . . let me see . . .” He picks up another file. “Public indecency, apparently for making out with one Frank Barnes in a stolen car.”

“Isn’t that the name of that cop?” Alice asks.

“What cop?” Davis asks.

“The one Mattie’s friends with.”

“The plot thickens,” Davis says gleefully. Digging through my family’s secrets has banished all thoughts of ghosts. The only ghosts here are ghosts of my benighted childhood.

“I told Alice all this before,” I say, affecting boredom. “Yes, Frank’s father, the town chief of police, caught Frank and me making out in the backseat of his dad’s Dodge Dart. Frank got sent to Camp Maplewood—a boot camp—for six months and I got three months at the Hudson Training School.”

“I thought you said you were away for a year,” Alice says.

“I—I got more time for bad behavior,” I say. “So yeah, I was a bad, bad girl and my father was a draconian hard-ass—”

“Who sent all his juvies to a place called Pine Crest Child Care after 1975,” Davis supplies. “Why didn’t he keep sending them to Hudson?”

“Because Hudson closed down in 1975. My father led the fight to have it closed down.”

“Because of what happened to you there.”

“In part.”

“Oh, I think in large part, Mattie. It says here”—he plucks a loose sheet of paper off the desk—“that you were raped by a guard there.”

I don’t answer. I am gripping the edge of the desk to keep from shaking, but it’s making the desk shake instead. Lady Justice’s scales tremble and chime.

“Is that true, Mattie?” Alice asks in a small voice.

“Yes,” I say. “My father hadn’t counted on that consequence of my adjudication. Ironic, huh? They sent me away to teach me a lesson for making out with a boy and I get raped by a thirty-four-year-old guard.”

“Your father had the place closed down. The guard was sentenced to ten to twenty. The next year Pine Crest Child Care opened up—a brand-spanking-new juvenile facility! I’m surprised he didn’t name it for you, Mattie. You must have felt proud!”

“Hey,” Alice says, “I was at Pine Crest. It’s—”

“Not as bad as Hudson,” I say, “but that’s not saying much.”

“No, but your daddy sure thought it was great. He sent every one of his adjudications there . . . almost as if he had a financial interest in the place . . . oh wait . . .” Davis whips out a piece of paper from another pile. I’d be impressed with how he’s put the whole story together if I didn’t know how all the papers had been stacked in that bottom drawer. I’ve made it easy for him. “Look, he did! Pine Crest was built on land your family owned. Your father held a ten percent share of the facility, so every time he sent some kid there he made a pretty penny.”

“It’s like that ‘kids for cash’ scandal in Pennsylvania,” Alice says, staring at me.

“Exactly,” Davis crows. “Only Judge Lane never got caught—at least he hadn’t gotten caught. This here letter, though, from the federal prosecutor, says that they were gonna be looking into some irregularities and unorthodox connections between Judge Lane’s adjudications and his financial interests in Pine Crest. It’s here with all the other files.” Davis waves his hand at the stacks arrayed on the desk. “And here’s another thing I noticed.” He holds up another page, this one splattered with bloodstains. I know what’s on this one. It’s my father’s suicide note. It was on his desk when I found him.

“Forgive me,” he’d written, “but justice must be served.”

“Your daddy shot himself, didn’t he, Mattie? Because he knew the feds were coming for him.”

“I thought your family all died from carbon monoxide poisoning,” Alice says, giving me a suspicious look.

“He tampered with the pipes on the furnace so that the house would fill with gas,” I tell Alice. I don’t care about explaining to Davis but Alice deserves the truth. She’s too young to have been one of those kids my father sent to Pine Crest for a minor offense, but if she had ever been in my father’s courtroom that’s what would have happened to her. “I think he thought that the shame of the scandal would be too much for us to live with. He may have been right about my mother; she was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and would have been truly lost without him. I can even forgive him for including me in his plans. He thought I was ruined after what happened to me at Hudson. He blamed himself—that’s why he contributed to having Pine Crest built—but I once overheard him saying to my mother that it would have been better if I had been murdered. He said being raped had turned me into a promiscuous slut.”