You Let Me In - Camilla Bruce Page 0,45
Barnes, and Dr. Martin could only see the illusions Pepper-Man and I spun. I know one thing, though: it’s hard having your future hanging in the balance, not knowing what other people will decide about your fate. I had already escaped it once, you know, when I made up that life with Tommy Tipp in the brown house, fooling everyone into believing I had bent my head and abided by society’s rules. Now I was back at square one again, with the good people of S— defining my worth and my measure, deciding where to put me so that I’d make sense.
* * *
I will never forget that corpulent, ugly prosecutor, Mr. Carew, pacing the courtroom floor, painting a picture for the jury to see of an unhinged, jealous wife who dismembered her husband’s body and left it out for the birds to find.
“Imagine her,” he said, “pulling the body across the floor and down those concrete steps. His head is lolling; his limbs are flailing, as she drags him down to the cold basement. There”—he paused to take a breath—“she hauls him onto the workbench and gets to it with knives, axe, and cleaver, neatly dismembering him at the joints. Does she cry? No. She is still filled with a raging jealousy. She thinks Tommy’s erectile problems stem from his countless affairs. To her, the dismemberment and desecration of the body is just a part of the punishment…”
Dr. Martin defended me the best that he could: “She is sick,” he said. “She has been suffering from delusions since she was a child. You cannot hold her accountable for this crime. In her mind he was not a man at all, but a creature made from natural debris, collected from the woods where she spent her happiest hours as a child.”
In the end, Myra Barnes was the most convincing. She looked like an expensive stick of cinnamon in there; all dressed in brown; tall, powerful, tough, and pencil thin. Her hair was a shock of brown curls, sprouting in every direction. She spoke with confidence, knowing she had the support of her expert witness: “There is no way a woman Cassie’s size can move a body the size of Tommy Tipp downstairs to the basement, effectively dismember it, and move it back upstairs to spread it across the forest. If she was involved, she would have needed help, and Cassie doesn’t have any friends—we know that from all we have learned in here.
“Furthermore, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that she was in any way recruiting outside help for the grisly endeavor. Is Cassie sick? Maybe. Is Cassie jealous? Maybe. Did she kill Tommy Tipp? Hardly. It’s much more reasonable to look to Tommy’s own criminal past and the ‘friends’ he made back then. Maybe he owed someone money? Maybe he still had a secret life? We don’t know that for sure…”
Whatever she did, my lawyer convinced them all, wrapped them in doubt and reasoning, and I will forever be grateful for that.
I walked out of there as a free woman, with nothing more than the usual distrust and suspicion tainting my name.
Dr. Martin was happy for me, but sad too:
“I guess there is no way I can convince you to commit yourself to a hospital now?”
“No,” I said, bursting with joy. “No chance at all, my dear doctor.”
* * *
The transition from the hospital wasn’t all painless. On that first day, I paid the taxi driver, dropped my bag in the living room, and set about searching the house for my Pepper-Man, but he wasn’t there. Why would he be, anyway? He was done playing Tommy Tipp, and I hadn’t been home for ages. But I had been worrying about him, wondering how he was to feed while I was away? I imagined all kinds of things; saw him perish among the coiling roots; dried up and shriveled like a mummy; or deserting me for a handsome stag, entwining that life with his instead … I was usually able to calm myself down by reminding myself that Pepper-Man had survived long before me and was in every way capable of taking care of himself, and should he choose to leave me for another life, well—there wasn’t really much I could do about that.
I didn’t dwell on these thoughts for long, though; since building a bond like ours, borne first of need and then sewn up with trust, takes time. I didn’t really think my absence for a few