Lies of the Heart

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  TWO

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  THREE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Michelle Boyajian

  Viking

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U. S. A

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Michelle Boyajian, 2010

  All rights reserved

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Boyajian, Michelle.

  Lies of the heart : a novel / Michelle Boyajian.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-19007-4

  1. Trials (Murder)—Fiction. 2. Widows—Fiction. 3. Grief—Fiction. 4 Married people—Fiction.

  5. Marriage—Fiction. 6. Speech therapist and patient—Fiction. 7. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.O924L54 2010

  813’.6—dc22 2009044783

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

  Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Mom and Dad

  Prologue

  It’s one of those surreal moments in life, sitting there in the courtroom and staring into the eyes of her husband’s killer. Katie wasn’t at the recreation center the day Jerry LaPlante shot Nick, but looking into Jerry’s light blue eyes she actually sees Nick’s face jerk with confusion and pain as the bullet tears into his brain by way of the soft skin between his right eye and the bridge of his nose. She sinks into the blueness of Jerry’s eyes and follows the bullet’s path as it rips through Nick’s frontal lobe, instantly severing memories of their boating trips to Cape Cod, their wedding day, and late nights curled up together in bed, whispering. She sees the bullet careen off the back of his skull, exploding and fragmenting, the shards of graphite destroying his sense of taste and smell, his ability to blink and smile, his capacity to match images and feelings with words. She watches the bulk of the tiny bullet puncture Nick’s hypothalamus—what the regional pathologist has called the center of all human emotion—where it finally comes to rest. In her mind she imagines that this fragment explodes every happy feeling Nick has ever experienced, that in the seconds before death claims him his shattered brain has one last gray-matter extravaganza, and that she is in there somewhere, smiling and touching his arm with love. One last cerebral orgasm before he leaves her world and she ends up here, in court, staring into the eyes of her husband’s killer.

  ONE

  1

  It would only take about twenty seconds—twenty-five, tops. But Katie times it in her head again anyway, because Richard is really on a roll now, he’s pacing back and forth in front of the jurors and unbuttoning the jacket of his dark suit. Katie knows exactly what this means, knows that now he’s presented her husband to the jurors—Nick’s faithful service to the speech-pathology community, his selfless behavior with his clients, his devotion to the mentally handicapped population—it’s time clients, his devotion to the mentally handicapped population-it’s time to tell them about that day, it’s time for Richard to take Nick away again. So she closes her eyes and carefully counts it out again:

  Five seconds to rise and make her way to the end of the front row. She will be polite, of course, she will say Excuse me, excuse me the whole way, but she has to be quick so she won’t hesitate if she accidentally tramples a foot or two. Another five to push open the little gate, to step through, and then walk around to the right and face the defense table. At least a full ten seconds to throw herself directly across the table and onto Jerry, to dig her right index finger into one of his eye sockets, hooked and pulling, or to slam the heel of her palm up on the underside of his nose, hard. Yes, about twenty seconds. But possibly another ten if the bailiffs are quick, if they beat her to where Jerry is sitting there, hunched over a yellow writing tablet with a pen.

  A pen.

  Add a few more seconds to wrestle it out of his hand, to raise it high and then plunge it—

  “And then that defendant walked into the Warwick Center gymnasium on May fifth of this year, at approximately two-thirty in the afternoon, where Nicholas Burrelli was playing a game of pickup basketball with two of his clients,” Richard says in his confident, sonorous voice.

  Katie opens her eyes, because she knows what will happen if she keeps them closed, how the words will begin to form and take shape, how she will see it all over again: her husband sidestepping with the ball, his face flushed with happiness, the beads of sweat forming. And then, always too soon, the blind rush of film moving forward—her husband flat on his back, face ghostly, fading. Dark blood pooling underneath his head, the fingers of thick liquid slowly escaping from underneath.

  Richard stands in front of the jurors, his arm outstretched and pointing at Jerry. Jerry’s lawyer, Donna Treadmont, places her hand lightly on Jerry’s back, but Jerry stays bent over the pad.

&nb
sp; “And Jerry LaPlante reached into the pocket of his windbreaker”—Richard mimes this, puts his hand into his pocket and then pulls it out with his index finger pointing, thumb up in the air—“and he pulled out a gun. He raised the gun to eye level and walked across the basketball court toward Nick, who had his back to him.”

  Richard holds his finger-gun in front of him and slowly walks to the defense table. Donna’s hand makes wide, swirling motions on Jerry’s broad back, but he’s still focused on the pad, the pen moving carefully across the page.

  “And he didn’t stop until he got to within three feet of Nick.”

  Richard stops, gun trained on Jerry’s lowered head, and there is complete silence. But it’s too late for Katie, because his words have already taken form—she sees Nick’s face, his dark eyes squinted and filled with laughter, and she hears the sound of the bouncing basketball echoing off the walls, the squeaky shuffling of sneakers on the court. And then the inevitable happens, in the precious seconds before the bullet takes Nick to the floor: he is suddenly in the room with her, she feels Nick’s hand in hers, his warm breath against her neck. Her entire body full of him, of who he still is, until Richard’s dramatic sigh intrudes.

  She checks on the jurors, turns quickly to follow their intent stares: Richard has become a statue in front of the defense table, body frozen in place, gun still pointing. Katie stares, too, and then a sudden anger zippers through her body, a hot scraping on the inside of her skin—Richard’s pose so theatrical, so deliberately staged that she has to turn away. She flicks her eyes over to the jury box, focuses on an elderly male in the middle of the back row—his hand flat over his heart, mouth slightly open. Better, she thinks. We should all have our hands over our hearts.

  “And Nick turned around,” Richard finally says, glaring briefly at Jerry’s lowered head, dropping his finger-gun and walking back to the jurors, “and he sees the defendant standing there, aiming the gun right at his face. And Nick says, ‘Hey, buddy.’ ”

  There is a sharp intake of breath from a juror in the front row, a heavy, middle-aged woman with thick mascara and penciled eyebrows. Richard nods at her: I know.

  “And do you know what that man said, ladies and gentlemen?” A weary arm rises in Jerry’s direction, palm facing upward. Richard’s voice is soft with disbelief as he shakes his head. “Do you know what that defendant said right before he pulled the trigger and shot Nicholas Burrelli in the face? He said, ‘Time to go, Nick.’ ”

  Richard grips the banister with both hands, lowers his head, offers the courtroom another exaggerated sigh. Again there is silence, and the anger returns—pinballing inside Katie’s head now, ricocheting with short, fierce thumps against her skull. This is real! she wants to shout as she watches Richard’s pretense of composing himself. She wants to stand, walk through the little gate, step up behind Richard. Poke him on the shoulder with one finger. Say quietly, but firmly, That’s enough, Richard. Really. It would only take about fifteen seconds.

  Richard tips his head up at the jurors. “ ‘Time to go, Nick,’ ” he finally says, softly, almost wistfully.

  The laden quiet that follows expands inside Katie’s body, clogging her throat like a thick yellow wax.

  “Then do you know what he did next?”

  Katie can barely hear him now. Even Judge Hwang is straining forward.

  “The defendant, Mr. LaPlante, smiled.”

  Richard stands straight, rubs his face with both hands. There is a fierce buzzing in Katie’s ears, in her chest, as she watches the affected, incredulous look form on Richard’s face. It isn’t just a story, she thinks, It isn’t your story. But then she sees the court reporter, stationed between the jurors and the witness stand. How her fingers are poised over the keys, waiting for Richard to continue.

  “He smiled.”

  It’s a whisper this time, then Richard raises his right hand and slams it down on the banister. “And BAM!” He rushes to the defense table again, suit jacket flapping, finger-gun pointing. Donna grips Jerry’s shoulder now, her knuckles white from squeezing, but Jerry’s attention never leaves the page before him.

  “This defendant pulled the trigger and shot Nicholas Burrelli directly in the face from a distance of three feet. He smiles and shoots Nicholas Burrelli right in the face!”

  Richard shakes his head in disbelief again, turns and walks back to the jurors.

  “You’re going to hear a lot of words repeated when the defense’s experts take the stand. Words like ‘awareness’ and ‘diminished capacity’ and ‘moral culpability.’ And a lot of people are going to sit in that witness chair and talk about the defendant’s childhood, about the difficulties he’s had to face in this life. But most of all,” Richard says, his voice an octave lower, eyes narrowed, “they’re going to tell you that because the defendant is a mentally retarded man, he shouldn’t be held responsible for his actions. Because he’s mentally retarded, he doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong. Because he’s mentally retarded, he didn’t know what he was doing the day he murdered Nicholas Burrelli, and that he shouldn’t be sitting in a court of law today. You’re going to hear a lot of things that make you doubt that moment when Mr. LaPlante executed Nick, but will you all promise me one thing?”

  Two female jurors in the back row are nodding in sync.

  “Will you remember that moment? Will you remember that moment when he walked straight up to Nick, smiled, and then shot him in the face? Not for me, but for all the people Nick tried to help, day after day? Not for me, but for Nicky’s wife, Katie, who is sitting right there in the front row, a widow at only thirty-two years old—”

  She knows that Richard is pointing at her, that his face is filling with practiced sympathy, but Katie has closed her eyes, is counting seconds again now that the words about that day have stopped. But there are two targets for her rage now, and all she can think of is the kind of permanent damage that can be inflicted with fingernails, teeth.

  And then, like it has so many times in the past six months, the simmering rage begins its inevitable mutation, it transforms from a fierce red pounding into something else, something heavy and colorless—a melting that spreads inside her like the slow, cold flooding of a basement.

  Dead. She’s here because Nick is dead.

  And then all she can do is cover her face with both hands, and let the tears rise.

  “Kay-tee.”

  They’re trying to handcuff Jerry, but he’s waving a piece of yellow paper high into the air; he darts his head past the bailiffs and court officer, past Donna, who attempts to snatch the paper away. Jerry’s blue eyes are searching for Katie’s.

  “Okay, Jerry, okay,” Donna says.

  “It is for her,” Jerry says, hand still high and waving. Before Katie can blink it away, she thinks how proud Nick would be if he were here: even under pressure, Jerry remembers to enunciate carefully.

  “I’ll give it to her, okay? Jerry?”

  Jerry’s supporters from the Warwick Center, packed into the rows behind the defense table, watch in mute shock until Donna sends an urgent look over her shoulder; immediately there is movement forward, soft encouraging words, hands reaching out. Katie reacts physically to these sounds and motions, to these people who were once her friends—the impossible weight of betrayal settling inside her stomach and chest until she feels the tears gathering again, just from the simple, familiar sight of Judith Moore, a volunteer from the cafeteria, impatiently swiping at her bangs. Or Veronica Holden, the work program’s receptionist and probably her closest friend at the center, lifting her arm to pat Jerry—her wooden bracelets slipping down her arm, making that clunky noise Katie knows so well. Just last spring, she thinks, I borrowed them for a wedding.

  But she indulges only briefly in this heaviness that cements her to her seat, in feeling sorry for herself, because then she locates it again: the sharp, exacting comfort of anger. It’s become a constant in her life now, this back-and-forth, the sadness and then the sizzling an
tagonism. The newness of reaching out to this anger is unsettling at times, so unlike the way she’s dealt with conflict before, but also utterly effective: the tears are gone now. She sits back on the bench, crosses her arms.

  The bailiffs finally get Jerry cuffed, reddened faces betraying their frustration, and Katie allows herself a longer look. His chest is wider than both bailiffs put together, it looks like he’s going to burst right out of the dark blue suit she and Nick bought him for his forty-second birthday last year. His thinning brown hair has been neatly combed and parted to the left side, and there are red bumps on his cheeks and chin from a quick, careless shave. Jerry’s eyes, lost in the roundness of his face, are pinned onto hers.

  The people and the sounds in the room recede instantly. All she can do is stare back.

  “Kay-tee,” he whispers, low and urgent, “it is me.”

  He’s been medicated. Katie recognizes the droopiness in the eyelids, the way his fleshy lower lip hangs, the paleness in his plump face. Like that time she gave him Dramamine out on the boat, right before the air show started above Narragansett Bay—the gentle rocking causing havoc deep inside Jerry’s belly. She remembers how he scanned the sky with troubled eyes that day, the way he pointed. “God up there,” he said, his other hand on his stomach, and both Katie and Nick knew what he meant: every pain he felt was an indictment, a punishment for things he couldn’t understand. He took the Dramamine from Katie without question, fell asleep in the cuddy long before the fighter jets roared overhead. But she remembers how hard he fought it, how that sleepy face searched out hers and Nick’s and the pale sky with drowsy excitement—the terror of sin and punishment temporarily forgotten once again.

  And now those sleepy eyes are penetrating hers, asking a hundred questions, and it happens in a flash: she sees the bullet enter and move through Nick’s brain, she watches Nick forget her and everything they shared together, the furious path of the bullet erasing both of them, inch by inch.