The Silver Star(55)

For a moment, I genuinely believed Doris had come to apologize and try to smooth things over. She was constantly complaining about what a no-count scoundrel her husband was—always tomcatting around, had a terrible temper, picked fights right and left, lied through his teeth. I thought Doris was going to say something like “Look, what my husband did was wrong, but he does provide for me and my kids, and if you go ahead with this, it will hurt my family.”

But as soon as I saw Doris’s face, I realized she had not come to make amends. Her mouth was tight and her eyes were all fired up.

“What the goddamn hell do you think you’re doing?” she shouted. “How dare you? How dare you, after all we’ve done for you?”

The deputies, she said, had come to her house and arrested her husband, taking him down to the jail, where they fingerprinted him and put him in a cell. His lawyer was arranging bail even as she spoke, and Jerry would be out by the end of the day.

We didn’t know what we were up against, Doris said. We had picked a fight with the wrong rhino. Her husband knew the law inside and out. He’d won countless lawsuits. He had fought a case all the way to the Supreme Court of the state of Rhode Island and had won. We would regret the day we started this. “No jury’s going to believe you lying sluts.”

At first I was stunned, but when Doris started threatening us and accusing us of lying, I got pretty steamed myself. “Don’t you get all high and mighty,” I said. “We have an eyewitness. He’ll testify to what happened. Your husband hurt Liz, and now you’re pretending he’s a saint and talking about all you did for us?”

“Your sister’s a whore!” Doris shouted. “My husband hired her as his personal secretary, he paid her, he trained her, he trusted her, he bought her nice clothes, and he treated her like a queen. We know the two of you were stealing from us. Your sister was drinking yesterday, and she put the moves on Jerry in the backseat of that car. When he turned her down, she made up this bullshit story. She was out to get him all along because he had your worthless uncle fired. You think you’ve got your evidence? Well, we’ve got our evidence. We have a vodka bottle with y’all’s fingerprints all over it as proof.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, since I’d never had a drink of vodka in my life and I was pretty sure Liz hadn’t, either, but I pushed it out of my mind. “You can try to twist the facts as much as you want,” I said. “But you know your husband did this. I don’t care what a big shot he is, the truth will come out.”

“When the truth about you two comes out,” Doris said, “you won’t be able to show your skanky faces in this town. Mark my words. My husband will destroy you!”

Doris climbed back into the Le Mans, slammed the door, jerked the car into reverse, then gunned it down the driveway, tires spraying gravel. I watched with my hands on my hips, fighting the urge to give her the finger because I knew Uncle Tinsley would find it appalling. “She thought she could scare us, but it didn’t work, did it?”

“This is going to be a shit storm,” Uncle Tinsley said.

It was the first time I had heard him use a curse word.





CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE


That evening Liz announced there was absolutely no way she would consider going to school the next day. Neither Uncle Tinsley nor I tried to talk her into it.

The next morning, as soon as I got to the bus stop, I could tell that everyone knew. Word spread quickly in a small town like Byler. All it took was one deputy mentioning to his brother-in-law that Tinsley Holladay’s niece had filed charges against Jerry Maddox, and within hours it was the talk of the barbershop and the beauty parlor. The other kids were clearly discussing it, and when they saw me, they started shushing each other, saying things like “Here she comes,” “Dummy up,” and “Where’s the other one?”

When I got to school, there was time before first period to go to the library, which always had a copy of the Byler Daily News. I expected Maddox’s arrest to be a big front-page story because the paper usually played up anything local, no matter how small—a horse getting stuck in a pond, someone’s toolshed catching on fire, or a farmer growing a five-pound tomato. The story wasn’t on the front page, or even the second or third page. I finally found it at the back, under a section called “Police Blotter.” The headline was “Mill Boss Charged.” The article said:

Jerry Maddox, 43, a foreman at Holladay Textiles, has been charged with the alleged assault of a local girl, 15, whose name is being withheld because of her age. He has been released on bail. No trial date has been set.