sealed. A bidding war began, ending forty-eight hours later in seven figures.
I’d become an overnight sensation—the Great White Hope of a New York publisher threatened with potential bankruptcy and unprepared for the advent of on-line publishing, e-books, print on demand. Rife with paranoia, they’d already dumped most of their mid-list writers, and were placing all their bets on a hot new blockbuster.
My book, someone high up had decided, would be blockbuster enough to hit the New York Times bestseller list.
And I hadn’t yet written a word.
As for Timothea, it did not surprise me that she’d turned her B&B into a writer’s colony. It was Timothea who first inspired me to write, sitting at her cherry-wood dining room table in the big white house, while everyone else was out on the beach or hiking around the island.
Tiny and remote, there was never much to do on Esme Island but swim and hike. I’d linger behind, my nose in a book, and one day Timmy—as she asked me to call her—sat me down with a pad and pencil and told me to write. She saw something in me back then, something I was too absorbed in being a teenager to see.
Later, when I took legal writing in law school, I began to recognize a few stirrings of potential in that direction. It wasn’t until after the arrest last January, however, that I seriously thought of becoming a scribbler for a living.
A ludicrous thought, an oxymoron for most struggling authors—writing for a living. But once convicted and sentenced for drug possession—if that was the way it turned out at trial—there was little chance I’d ever be a lawyer again.
Some days, at least when the sun shines, I sit here in the bay window of my parents’ house, at my father’s desk, and look out at ships going by on Puget Sound. Before me is the Space Needle, high-rise apartment buildings, sparkling blue water and islands with lush green forests. A halcyon scene. A scene I grew up loving, with great hopes to one day be part of it, to leave my mark on it, doing nothing but good.
How then, could things have gone so wrong?
Fresh out of law school fifteen years ago, at twenty-five, I still had some of those wildly heroic ideas law students get about saving the world. Growing up, I’d watched my father defend corporate raiders and tax cheaters at Sloan and Barber. It was always expected I’d follow in his footsteps. Then, as children will, I’d opted to do the opposite with my fine new degree and become a public defender.
This was not entirely to spite my father, who had hoped I’d one day be a partner at Sloan and Barber, a daughter he could show off at the country club, since he’d never had a son. I actually considered S&B for a while, but in law school I’d begun to hear about innocent people who’d been jailed for crimes they didn’t commit. Many lingered in prison ten, twenty years, while life outside the walls passed them by. Their children grew up, their wives or husbands moved on.
It was something that saddened and even frightened me. The idea that someone who had done nothing wrong could be yanked from his or her home, charged with a crime, and sent to prison for years—even life—sent chills down my spine. It smacked of Nazism, innocent people being dragged off into the night. I think this frightened me because I knew that if it could happen to one, it could happen to all.
My fear was theoretical in nature, back then. I couldn’t have known that one day it would happen to me. Unless, of course, it’s true that we come in “knowing” at some level what our life will be—thus explaining, for some, the kind of choices we make.
It was the advent of DNA as a means of identification in criminal cases that finally freed me of some of those fears. DNA had been discovered in 1870 by a chemistry student named Friederich Miescher, but no one realized its full potential back then. It wasn’t until the 1950s that deoxyribonucleic acid was discovered to carry genetic material from one generation to the next. Now, as everyone knows who watched the O.J. trial, it’s commonly used in criminal cases, much like fingerprints, to prove a person guilty or not. It can be obtained from something as simple as a swab of fluid from inside a cheek, or a hunk of hair.
Any prison inmate who’s been jailed wrongly can afford a lock of hair. What most can’t afford is a lawyer to fight the good fight. Someone needs to get a new trial going. Tests must be run, and DNA experts persuaded to testify pro bono—free of charge. Sometimes agencies such as the American Civil Liberties Union will help with the cost. However it’s done, it must be proved that the killer’s or rapist’s DNA, found on or near the victim, in no way matches the client’s—the wrongly accused perpetrator of the crime.
The plight of these wrongly accused became a moral crusade for me. During my last year of law school, I made the decision to shun the big fees my father assured me I could be making within a few years at Sloan and Barber. Instead—I announced with all the exuberance of naive youth—I would defend the poor and downtrodden.
Little did I know that within fifteen years, I’d be one of Seattle’s poor and downtrodden.
An exaggeration, of course. I tend to do that on days like today when everything seems so black. Still, when I was brought up on charges five months ago, I lost my job, and it looked for a while as if I’d be joining my clients on the streets. If my father hadn’t died of a heart attack, leaving me a modest inheritance, and if my mother hadn’t moved to Florida, leaving her house vacant, that’s precisely what might have occurred.
And there again we have one of life’s little tricks—it takes away the people you love, and replaces them with assets.
So what do you do? Do you say, “Go away, Life, I don’t want your filthy lucre”? I think not. Not, at least, when the meter reader is at one’s door.
So I moved into my parents’ house shortly after the arrest. Then last month, in April, out on bail, I went to Thornberry along with five other women who were invited there, just like me. We were all potential but as yet unpublished authors, and I suspected from the first that each of the others was running from something—also like me.
No one admitted to that, of course. Not at first. It took the quake to make us trust each other enough to share our stories. By then, it was far too late.
Because the time sequence of the two events that changed my life this past year can become confusing, I am writing them down here in much the way I write my notes for a legal brief. Much the way, in fact, that I’m writing the notes for my upcoming trial.
It is early May now. Last January I’d taken on the case of a woman arrested for prostitution. She was middle-aged, black, not particularly attractive—in other words, a piece of meat, nothing more, to the five Neanderthal cops on duty at the jail that night.
The woman was released when the morning shift came on. Five cops from the night shift followed her into an alley and gang-raped her for more than an hour. They used everything on her—nightsticks, guns, themselves. When it was over, Lonnie Mae Brown had just enough strength left to check herself into a hospital, before falling unconscious. When she came to, she refused to report the incident to the cops.
She also refused all tests. She was afraid of retaliation—and I couldn’t dismiss her fears. The rape of women in jail has been common in recent times, as has punishment for anyone who talks. Though Lonnie Mae’s rape had occurred outside in an alley, public outrage about renegade cops was high on the totem pole of police reform. The stakes, for the cops, were high. For that reason, if no other, they tried to make the victim look guilty.
A young, black doctor I knew sized up the situation and called me, thinking that, as a lawyer, I might be able
