She nodded.
“Did he kill your mother too?”
Isabel’s breath caught in her throat, hoping she’d misunderstood the signing but she saw Ed’s jaw tighten and knew she hadn’t. Ed had been right in trying to avoid this path. Often his relationship with Davey was excellent, like this morning, but it was sometimes marred, and not merely by a boy’s typical disappointments over a busy father who wasn’t always around. Wrongly, Davey blamed Ed for his mother’s death and there would be days when he just wouldn’t communicate with his father at all, freezing him out.
What was going on inside Davey’s head became clear just after the wedding two years earlier. His doctors had suggested some new tests and it turned out that Davey wasn’t mute at all. He was deaf, certainly, but there was no physiological impediment to him speaking.
Isabel had been witness to Ed’s understandable tangle of emotions: delight his son had speech, but distress at why he refused to use it.
Off her own bat, Ed’s assistant Debbie tracked down a psychologist who specialised in deaf kids. After three sessions with Davey, Professor Howard called Ed in. Isabel went with him and they sat silent, watching a video of the doctor interviewing the boy in ASL.
Isabel spent as much time watching Ed as the video. She could see Ed tearing himself apart at the boy’s perverse theory. After his mother’s car accident, Davey had read the lips of some adults gossiping that she had been “running off” with the man in the car. The little boy’s twisted logic was that Ed must’ve done something bad to her to make her run away.
Isabel saw Ed shaking as Davey continued signing: “She went to heaven to run away from my daddy and I sent my voice up there to bring her back.”
THE revelation turned Ed’s already strong political partisanship into zealotry. Once he learned Davey was blaming him for his wife’s death, his hostility to the Democrats and especially Isabel’s opponent, Bobby Foster, became very personal.
Ed had explained the whole story to Isabel, starting with Jane’s affair with former Democratic congressman Peter Jackson from New York. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Foster had been the lawyer who helped the bastard escape any serious penalty for the charges, getting him just a paltry fine. A pittance for a life… lives.
“My wife dies, Davey loses his mom and that creep Jackson gets off scot-free, thanks to that slimy, sweet-talking Bobby Foster. Yet my son,” Ed choked, “my beautiful boy… he blames me… and won’t talk to me because he sent…”
Ever since, Ed had despised Robert Foster and everything about him: his role in Jackson’s defence; his past career as a money-grubbing trial lawyer; even his glossy magazine good looks.
When Foster got the Democratic Party’s nomination, Ed’s investigations dredged up some of Foster’s own passions; mostly of the tiresome variety that would plunge him into hot water with his wife if she ever found out, something Ed had toyed with facilitating many times.
But what haunted Foster’s campaign—his own Karim Ahmed affair—was not his defence of Jackson, or even his infidelity… it was Joe Cook.
All these years after, few could stomach what Foster had done for his notorious rapist-murderer client. Harvard Law School taught that Foster’s strategy at Cook’s trial was a model… of what not to do. He’d idealised Cook to the jury as an articulate and energetic white worker for black rights, a hapless victim of police who was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn’t even his gun! Mistaken identity. Foster tried it all, and enough of it worked. But within two months of the not-guilty verdict being handed down, cops from the next precinct shot Cook dead as he clambered over the tenement rooftop of a young black mother and her two daughters, aged twelve and ten. Foster’s former star client had saved the mother… for last.
“The wealthy defence attorney with political aspirations,” as the media liked to call him back then, took the opportunity to appear on TV that same night and, holding back tears, told the world he was ditching the law for a life of public service in politics. It worked, with most of the country applauding him for ditching money for public duty as penance for his mistake.
But Ed was not among them, vowing that one day Foster would pay. For all his mistakes.
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