Chapter 7
Total silence hung over the tenth grade journalism class at Maples School, named for the grove of trees within which it had been constructed back in 1923. Heather Jeffers and her classmates gazed fixedly at the television set that had been brought into the room so they could watch and discuss the coverage of Richard Kraven’s execution; the set had been on since eight-thirty, and until the stroke of nine—noon in Connecticut, where the execution was taking place—several of the students had been speculating on how close to the deadline it would get before the execution was stayed. Maude Brink, who had been leading the discussion of both the media coverage of the execution and capital punishment itself for the last week, had warned them that this time a stay was unlikely, but some of the kids clung to their hopes right up until the end. What struck Mrs. Brink as most interesting was that those students most strongly opposed to capital punishment were the most certain that the execution would inevitably be delayed, while those who were the execution’s strongest supporters were convinced it would take place as scheduled.
Obviously, each faction believed that in the end the system would validate his or her own view.
Yet when the execution had taken place and the first word had come out of the prison that Richard Kraven was dead, the entire class had finally experienced the reality of it. This was not a television show, or a movie, or a book, in which the execution affected only a man who was the invention of a writer’s mind. This time it was real, and a man who had only a few seconds ago been as much alive as each of them was now dead. As they all watched numbly, the news anchor on the screen began cutting to correspondents around the country, each of them interviewing someone whose life would be directly affected by the execution.
First there was Edna Kraven, being interviewed in her small home in the south end of Seattle, not far from Boeing Field.
As the camera’s relentless eye zoomed in on the tear-stained face of Richard Kraven’s mother, Heather and her friends squirmed uncomfortably, watching the woman’s most private emotions exposed for all the world to watch.
“He was always a good boy,” Edna whispered, her fingers twisting a crumpled handkerchief with which she blotted at red-rimmed eyes every few seconds. “Smarter than all the other kids, always interested in everything, and always helping everyone. Everybody liked my Richard. How could they do this to him? Why did they want to? He never hurt anyone—never! It isn’t right! It just isn’t!” The camera held steady on the distraught woman as a fit of sobbing overcame her; then, in what seemed an almost reluctant retreat from her, so she could grieve in private, it cut away to Richard’s brother Rory, who sat across a worn coffee table from his mother.
“It must be almost as hard for you as for your mother,” the pretty blond correspondent said, her face carefully composed into an expression designed to tell the viewers that this job was not easy for her. “Tell us, what went through your mind as the clock at the prison struck noon?”
Rory Kraven, visibly nervous in front of the camera, glanced at his mother, then shrugged. “I—I guess I didn’t really think anything,” he stammered. “I mean, I know what my brother did, and—” But before he could continue, his mother cut him off.
“Nothing!” she flared. “My Richard did nothing, and you know it! How dare you speak ill of your brother? If you were half the man he was—”
As some invisible director at the network decided that Edna Kraven’s furious outburst was less compelling than her grief, the image on the screen abruptly switched to an elegantly dressed and perfectly coiffed woman of perhaps sixty, who was being interviewed by another attractive young network correspondent.
“I’m with Arla Talmadge in Atlanta. Mrs. Talmadge, how do you feel today?”
Arla Talmadge touched the corner of one eye with a perfectly pressed handkerchief, then sighed and shook her head. “I’m not sure what I feel anymore. Ever since Richard Kraven killed my son, I—well, there’s just an emptiness inside me. Did he say anything before they—well, before they did what they did?”
“Early indications are that he didn’t,” the reporter replied.
“Then we’ll never know why he did it, will we?” Mrs. Talmadge asked. “And I can’t help wondering, what was really accomplished today? After all, killing that man won’t bring my son or any of the others back, will it? I keep wondering if maybe he wouldn’t have—I don’t know—explained it all someday, I suppose. But now …” She drew in a shaky breath, let it out, then shook her head again. “I just don’t know,” she went on. “I suppose there’s nothing to do now except try to go on living.”
For almost fifteen minutes it went on, the images on the screen shifting as the families and friends of the victims were interviewed, some of them expressing relief that at last this grim Chapter in their lives was over; others barely able to contain their rage that Richard Kraven hadn’t been tortured before he died; still others echoing Arla Talmadge’s sad sense of resignation in the face of the inevitable.
It was in the midst of one of those interviews that the network anchor cut in to announce that the warden was ready to speak to the press, and the scene dissolved to a room painted in a sickly green in which lights had been set up and several microphones placed on the shiny surface of a gray metal table.
The classroom buzzed with anticipation, and then the students began nudging each other as they recognized Heather Jeffers’s mother in the group of witnesses who followed Warden Wendell Rustin into the room. Her face pale, her expression strained, she hovered near the wall just inside the door.
“It’s really her, Heather,” someone said from the back of the room. “It’s your mom! Cool!”
As the warden started to speak, Heather ignored her classmate’s comment, her eyes fixing on the screen.
“At noon today, Richard Kraven was executed,” Wendell Rustin began. “He entered the chamber at 11:55, and was strapped into the chair. The electrodes were applied, and at exactly noon he was exposed to a charge of two thousand volts. At two minutes past noon he was pronounced dead.” The warden fell silent for a moment, then appeared to look directly into the camera. “Are there any questions?”
Instantly, a babble of voices emerged from the television speakers, but then Rustin pointed to someone, and the rest of the crowd subsided into a restless silence. “Did he say anything? Did he confess?”
The warden glanced toward Anne Jeffers, who shook her head and seemed about to speak when suddenly a door opened and a uniformed guard stepped inside and whispered into Anne’s ear. A look of surprise crossed her face and she rushed from the room.
In the classroom, Heather Jeffers’s schoolmates all turned to gaze curiously at her, as if by dint of being Anne Jeffers’s daughter, she should be able to explain her mother’s sudden departure. Maude Brink, seeing the look of worry that had now come over Heather’s face, switched off the television. “All right,” she began as she moved briskly to the front of the room and faced the class. “What do we think? Was the coverage fair? Was it justified? Was it responsible reporting of news, or was it sensationalism? Who wants to start?”
Three hands instantly went up, and Mrs. Brink nodded to Adam Steiner, who sat in the back row and rarely spoke in class.
“How come they always have to talk to the families?” he asked. “I mean, Mrs. Kraven didn’t do anything—why couldn’t they just leave her alone?”
“How do you know she didn’t do anything?” someone else asked. “She must have done something to have raised a nut-case like Richard Kraven!”
“Maybe he had something wrong with his genes,” a third voice suggested. “Nobody knows what causes people to do things like that.”
“I heard he was a Satanist,” someone else called out, and Mrs. Brink finally raised her hand to bring some order back into the discussion.
“For now, let’s stick to the coverage, and not speculate on Richard Kraven’s motives, all right? This is a class in current events and journalism, not criminology—” The teacher fell silent as the door to her classroom opened. One of the principal’s secretaries came in, nodded curtly to her, and without any apology for disrupting the class, spoke directly to one of the students.
“Heather? Could you come with me, please? Mrs. Garrett would like to speak with you for a moment.”
Maude Brink was about to object that whatever it might be could surely wait until her class was over, but then she remembered Heather’s mother’s mysterious disappearance from the press conference, and gave the teenager an encouraging smile as she left the classroom. Something, obviously, had gone very wrong.
As Heather entered Olivia Garrett’s office, the principal gestured her onto the sofa, then sat in the wing-backed chair instead of returning to her desk.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news for you,” she said, approaching the subject with the directness for which she was famous throughout the school. “Your father’s secretary just called.”
“Rita?” Heather breathed. “Rita Alvarez?”
Mrs. Garrett nodded. “Your father has apparently had a heart attack. He’s been taken to the hospital, and your mother wants you to go there right away. Mrs. Alvarez is picking your brother up at his school, then she’ll come—”
But Heather Jeffers was no longer listening to Olivia Garrett. Instead she was trying to absorb what she had just been told. Her father? In the hospital?
A heart attack?
If her mother wanted her to go to the hospital—and Kevin, too—it must be serious! But just this morning he’d been fine! He’d gone out jogging, and when he’d come back, he hadn’t even been out of breath. So how could he have a heart attack?
Suddenly fifteen-year-old Heather felt far younger than she was, and far more vulnerable.
Was her father going to die?