Scott Caldwell stood at the receiving desk of the Bazelton police station and studied the piece of paper that the desk sergeant had just handed him. "Is this some kind of practical joke, Stan?" he asked with annoyance. "Because if it is, it's not very funny."
The desk sergeant assured Caldwell that it was no joke. The bail bond receipt was legitimate.
Caldwell examined the paper again and shook his head. "Five thousand dollars," he said in disbelief. "How the hell does that delinquent come up with five thousand dollars? That loser hasn't got a nickel to his name."
"He doesn't need the full five thousand, Scott, you know that," the desk sergeant said.
Caldwell shot him a look that went right through him. "Ten percent cash?" he said.
"You got it," said the desk sergeant. "The guy must have a friend or relative somewhere who agreed to put up five hundred for him. In any case, he's bonded out. I just thought you should know. Ronnie's back there now running him through check out. Shouldn't be more than a few more minutes."
Caldwell wanted to tear the bond receipt to shreds and drop the pieces on the stationhouse floor, but he resisted the urge to do so. Instead he merely handed the receipt back to the desk sergeant and began to walk, with deliberate and measured paces, toward the public entrance on the other side of the room. A water cooler stood near the front door, providing a convenient spot for Caldwell to park himself while he waited. He pulled a paper cup from the dispenser, filled it with cold, filtered spring water, then sat down on the window sill and leaned one arm across the top of the plastic water bottle.
He proceeded to sip from his paper cup with the slow, delicate precision of the finest wine taster. Between sips he reached behind himself with his free hand and massaged his spine. His lower back and tail bone still harbored a dull ache from the struggle that had occurred during Billy's arrest weeks earlier, and sitting for long periods without back support only made the pain worse. But he pushed the discomfort out of his mind. He would sit there and nurse cups of water for the rest of the day if he had to, he told himself. That little scumbag was not leaving the station without a final farewell.
The officer did not have to wait long. Billy's gangly form, clad as usual in a dingy, yellowed T-shirt and faded, torn blue jeans, strutted out of the holding area and across the lobby to the receiving desk, rebellious as ever. He approached and shook hands with the bail bondsman who had delivered the documents to effect his release. The bondsman was a large, potbellied man who sported a pony-tailed haircut and a scruffy goatee on his chin. Caldwell felt an instant dislike for the larger man as well. He looked like he could have been Billy's better-fed older brother.
The larger man instructed Billy as he signed two pieces of paper, one of which was handed back to the desk sergeant and the other folded and stuffed into a back pocket of the bondsman's jeans. The bondsman then nodded to the desk sergeant and began escorting his client to the door.
Caldwell fixed his stare on Billy's face as the two men crossed the room toward him, hoping to catch the younger man's attention before he left, but the freshly freed prisoner did not notice the officer glaring at him from beside the water cooler. He looked at his bondsman as he walked, talking to him and gesturing enthusiastically with his arms, no doubt expounding an embellished tale of the struggle which preceded his arrest. A wide smile played across his face as he talked, and his evident happiness at his newly won freedom only served to irritate Caldwell all the more.
The officer gulped down the last of his water and crushed the paper cup in his hand. He raised himself off the window sill. "Hey, junior," he said to Billy as the young man approached the door. Billy looked in Caldwell's direction. The officer was no more than five feet away. "You keep your nose clean out there, you hear?" Caldwell warned. "Otherwise, I'll have you back in that cell before you know it."
The smile instantly left Billy's face, and he glared back at the officer with narrowed eyes. "You want to go around with me again, honcho?" Billy asked combatively. "I'll put you on your ass in two seconds, just like I did before."
Caldwell stepped away from the water cooler and flung the crumpled paper cup at the young man with a backhanded motion. It bounced off Billy's chest and fell to the floor at his feet.
"Hey, hey!" the bail bondsman said, stepping between the two men and trying to keep them separated. "Just be cool now, Billy," he said to his client. "I'll handle this." Then, turning to Caldwell, he said, "We're not looking for any trouble here, officer. We just want to leave peacefully."
The commotion at the front door brought all other business in the room to a halt. The three men were suddenly the center of attention. Two other officers who had been working nearby now joined the group.
"What's the problem here?" asked one of them.
"No problem, officer, no problem," the bondsman assured him hastily. "We're just on our way out. We don't want any trouble."
The second officer moved in front of Caldwell and placed a hand on each of his shoulders. "Come on, Scott, back off," he said. "Let them be on their way."
Caldwell stood his ground. "Just remember what I said, tough guy," he growled at his opponent. "I've got my eye on you."
The bail bondsman turned Billy around and pushed him toward the door. "I remember everything," Billy declared over his shoulder, as the bondsman used his greater bulk to move his client through the doorway and down the stairs toward the parking lot.
* * *
The days of Eppie's confinement were long and lonely. Most of her hours were spent in her cell, alone, with little to do beyond studying the heavy walls which bound her in and wondering all the while when she might be released. Each afternoon she talked by telephone for a few minutes with her case worker, a stiff and obdurate woman only slightly younger than Mrs. Applebaum, but considerably more sour. The woman's manner of speaking gave the impression that she had held her current position for decades, for she could quote verbatim virtually every section and subsection of the juvenile justice code from memory. Over the years, the bureaucratic minutia of her role in the execution of civil jurisprudence in Heritage County had apparently seeped into every pore of her being, so that she and her job were now perfectly blended into one another. She repeatedly told Eppie that the procedures of the juvenile court were dutiful and sacrosanct, and that her release would come about when and only when the requirements of the court were satisfied. Their conversations were brief and filled with much legal terminology, most of which Eppie did not understand. When she would ask for further explanation she would invariably be told that court was about to reconvene, or some other pressing matter was at hand, and the details would have to wait for another time. Until the paperwork made its way through the system and was approved by the judge, however, there was nothing that could be done to expedite her release. Her situation was complicated, to be sure, and every procedure had to be followed. Eppie hung up the phone each day more depressed than the day before. She wondered if her case worker ever came out from behind her desk to visit a defendant in jail.
She was allowed to see visitors twice a day for thirty minutes at a time. Father Andrew visited every day, sometimes twice a day, and offered to do whatever he could to make her time behind bars more bearable. He brought books and magazines for her to read, including school books and homework assignments from her teachers so that she would not fall behind in her classes while she was out of school.
The Applebaums also visited regularly, and Shelley even brought Jonathan in one day. Eppie always looked forward to the visitation periods with great anticipation, for they were the only portion of her day during which she was happy and spirited, but the uplifting effects of those visits were only temporary. Each time she was led out of the visitation room and back to her lonely cell—each trip back down that long, sterile hallway, through those heavy doors and into that metal box with the hollow clang of the barred door behind her—she felt a despondency take hold of her which seemed greater with each passing day.
By the end of the week, Eppie's nerves were sorely frayed. She found that she had trouble sleeping. After the lights were turned off each night, she would lie on her bed and look up at the ceiling for hours before she was finally able to nod off into a restless slumber. Often she would wake in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, momentarily unsure of where she was, and then reality would cruelly hit her and she would again have to lie there interminably before sleep would return. She was tired most of the time, partially due to lack of sleep, but more significantly from boredom and constant worry. Books and magazines could occupy her mind for only the minor portion of each day, and she could find nothing of substance with which to fill the balance. From time to time one of the other cells in the holding room would be temporarily occupied by another arrestee—a bar patron whose drunkenness had engendered an uncivil pugnaciousness, or some petty criminal too slow or too incompetent to avoid capture—but they all seemed to bond themselves out within a few hours. For the greater part of each day, Eppie was the sole prisoner in the room, and so she spent the majority of her time alone, in solitary despair.
For hour upon hour she sat on her bed and stared at her surroundings—first the bars, then the ceiling, then the floor—and longed for some company. Having no one to talk to, she let her mind drift through the empty hours of the day, and she thought about the things that this whole experience might teach her. Many times she thought of Billy and the conversation they had had that first morning she had awoken behind bars. He was such a strange young man, Eppie thought, full of fire and anger so easily ignited—a tinderbox piled high with a dry, combustible fuel of seemingly endless supply. In such ways, she recognized, he was quite unlike herself.
She saw herself as a small piece of balsa wood adrift on the boundless ocean that was her life—an insignificant speck that was thoughtlessly pushed about by everything around her. She felt herself rise and fall with each passing swell, directionless but for the currents which carried her along, the winds which blew from ever-changing directions, and the tides which bowed the very surface of the sea. She was small and obscure and helpless to resist such callous forces. Having lost the faculty of self-guidance, her fate was at their mercy. Upon life she drifted wherever she was taken, one face oriented toward the sky, the sun and the air, which kept her warm and dry and visible to the lighter part of the world, the other face turned toward the water, which in its depths was cold and dark and suffocating, but which nonetheless buoyed her up to its surface, presenting her as an offering, as it were, to that aerial province which would not embrace her. Occasionally she was overtaken by a breaking wave which caught her from behind. Whether each wave was merely an eruption of the ancient energies which swirled up from the turmoil running beneath her, or whether it was a wall of resistance which was pulled up from its natural place by the force of the wind above, she could not know. Unable to escape its path, she would feel herself being carried upward along the arc of the water's rise, then suspended at the top of the crest for a moment of frightening uncertainty, when she did not know if she would glide smoothly down the back side of the wave as it passed or be thrown forward into its path again. Then she would feel herself being pitched over, the supporting water suddenly taken out from beneath her, and the weight of that water would come crashing down upon her, driving her down into its churning depths and holding her there, rolling her interminably. Such was her current situation. Eventually, though, she would rise back up to the surface, for she was lighter than the elements which surrounded her. It was the nature of her being to float.
Billy, on the other hand, was a human torpedo. Loaded at the tip with an unstable warhead, he moved beneath the waves under his own power and in a direction of his own choosing, all the while defying the currents and the tides to stop him or to alter his course. He laughed at the forces of the world as he moved, and he often tacked against them just for spite. He was at home in the water—built for it, in fact—and he traveled below its surface with ease and with a certain grace which was recognizable to those who were not directly in his path. He did not need to breathe free air, nor did he know any desire to measure the wind or the currents, for they were as nothing to him in his mutiny. And so he could remain hidden, stealthily swimming in the murky maw of that ocean for extended periods of time, until he chose to make his presence known.
Eppie had observed Billy only briefly as he had passed by on his obsessive hunt. She had heard the buzz of his motor, had felt the jostle of his wake. She was intrigued by the young man, not for his cause, for indeed he had little that could truly be called a cause, but rather for his commitment—for his knowledge of himself, for his sacrifice, for his disregard for the opinions that others might hold of him and, perhaps most of all, for the strength of his convictions and for the resulting peace which he seemed to find within himself. She believed that she was on her way toward discovering her own self-defining convictions from which she might derive a similar inner peace. The convictions which she sought were not Billy's own, she knew, although some portion of his credo might be shared. Nor, entirely, were they Rachel's or Allison's, nor even Father Andrew's. If anyone were to appear the appropriate archetype for her beliefs it would be Shelley, but even she could not serve as a perfect model. Eppie would have to define herself, would have to decide on her own which ideas she accepted and which she did not, and that definition would be a result of all of her experience, good and bad, hopeful and despairing. For the time being, though, the pursuit of those beliefs would have to wait. She did not want to define herself from the inside of this jail cell. There was a poisonous bitterness in here which sought only to infect her, to subtract some measure of goodness from her, and she saw nothing of value in it. She would find herself eventually, but it would not be in this place. The only thing she wanted to do now was to get out of jail, and to do so with a full complement of her former self intact.
She looked around at the walls of the holding room one more time, and she saw, as she had a hundred times before, that there was no clock on any of the walls. Why don't they put a clock in here? she wondered. She guessed that it was probably about three o'clock or so. Another two hours to kill until the visitation period at five, she thought. How am I going to pass the time?
She glanced at her school books sitting on the other end of the bed. She had already finished all of her homework for the week. She had read every magazine and book that had been brought to her. She had nothing more to do with her time except wait to be freed.