Injustice for all

PART 3
36

Hannah Mills, the former Katie Dean, looked up at the waterfall and wondered what she was doing. It was the first time in years she’d been hiking, and sitting at the base of Red Fork Falls in Unicoi County, she remembered why. The memories were inevitable: the long days in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the beauty of the dozens of cascades and falls she’d visited, the stands of old-growth timber. But those memories triggered others, others she’d tried to keep at bay.

Pretending Aunt Mary and Luke never existed was the easiest way to get by. She’d learned to put them, along with Lottie, the farm, the animals, all of it, out of her mind. It was as though everything had turned into clouds and drifted slowly away on the breeze.

After the fire-which Hannah couldn’t remember at all-her life had spun out of control for a while. She found herself with a new name, living in Salt Lake City in a downtown apartment, a few blocks from the giant Mormon Tabernacle. The agents in Knoxville had told her it was the only way they could ensure her safety, and at the time, she hadn’t the will to resist. An FBI agent named Fritz became her new best friend in Utah, but Hannah quickly grew homesick for the purple-shrouded mountains she loved so much. She packed what few things she had one day, got on a bus, and never looked back.

She wound up in Knoxville, alone and confused. The only person she had any regular contact with was Agent Rider, who, upon her return to Knoxville, had given her enough money to get a small apartment and survive until she could get on her feet. Then, a couple of weeks after she returned, Agent Rider was contacted by a lawyer from Gatlinburg who wanted to meet with Hannah. Agent Rider arranged the meeting, and it was there that Hannah learned that Aunt Mary had made her not only the executor of her estate, but a beneficiary of her will. Hannah and Lottie were each to receive one half of Aunt Mary’s money-just over three hundred thousand dollars each that had been invested in U.S. Treasury bills. Hannah also inherited the farm, but the lawyer told her that Mr. Torbett, the neighbor, had made an offer to buy it. The lawyer suggested Hannah accept the offer, and she did. She had no desire to return.

Hannah spent months in a fog, staring at the walls of her small apartment, lying in bed for days at a time, unwilling and unable to start over. She cursed God, or fate, or destiny, or whatever force it was that had selected her to bear the burden of so much pain and so much shame. She didn’t care about the money. It had no real value or meaning to her, especially considering how she’d come to acquire it.

It was Agent Rider who’d finally helped Hannah crawl out of the depths of her despair. He came by her apartment regularly and finally talked her into seeing a psychiatrist, a woman named Mattie Rhea. Dr. Rhea had prescribed medication-something called a serotonin reuptake inhibitor-and gradually, the fog began to lift. Hannah enrolled at the University of Tennessee in January of that year. She made few friends because she kept largely to herself, but the routine of campus life, along with the medication, helped her to gradually put the tragedies of the past behind her. Six years after she enrolled, she earned a master’s degree in sociology and got a job as the victim /witness coordinator at the Knoxville district attorney general’s office. Then, after spending another six years in quiet anonymity, helping people like her, people who had been the victims of crimes, she’d met Lee Mooney at a conference in Nashville and been persuaded to make a change.

Now, as she stood gazing up at the narrow, hundred-foot falls, a hand touched Hannah on the shoulder from behind.

“Maybe we should head back,” Tanner Jarrett said.

“You’re right,” Hannah said. “I smell a storm coming.”

Later that evening, several people from the office gathered at Rowdy’s, a sports bar in Johnson City, to celebrate Tanner’s twenty-seventh birthday. Hannah and Tanner had become friends, but Hannah was always careful not to give Tanner the idea that she might be looking for anything more. The hike earlier in the day was the first time the two of them had been without company. They went to lunch together sometimes, but always with someone else from the office along.

Today was Tanner’s birthday, and when he’d asked Hannah to hike to the falls with him and then accompany him to Rowdy’s later, she couldn’t say no. It would have been much easier to keep her distance if Tanner wasn’t so likable. He was handsome and funny and charming, and he had a way of making Hannah feel wonderful whenever she was around him. But she couldn’t get too close. She just couldn’t. Not yet.

The gathering consisted of Hannah and Tanner, Joe and Caroline Dillard, Lee Mooney, Rita Jones and her boyfriend-a lawyer Hannah didn’t know-and two other young prosecutors from the office and their dates. Hannah was enjoying herself. Joe and Caroline Dillard had become close friends of Hannah’s. More than once, she’d found herself wondering whether she might ever be as close to a man as Caroline seemed to be to Joe. They were virtually inseparable outside the office, and they treated each other with a gentle kindness and respect that Hannah imagined could only come from a bond that had been carefully nurtured for many years.

Hannah ate lightly while Tanner laughed and joked with Joe about a DUI case Tanner was prosecuting.

“You should have seen it,” Tanner said through a mouthful of chicken. “I put the police officer’s videotape in the machine, and it shows this woman getting out of her car. It takes a second to see that she’s stark naked from the waist down. She starts grinding on this officer and singing, ‘Hey, big spender.’ I thought her lawyer was going to lose his lunch right there in front of the judge.”

The laughter was contagious, the conversation light and easy, and Katie decided to do something she’d never done. She decided to have a drink. Tanner was driving. Why not? She turned to Lee Mooney, who was sitting on her right, and whispered, “Please don’t tell anyone, but I’ve never had a drink before. What should I order?”

Mooney smiled at her and bent close to her ear.

“Try a Vodka Collins,” he said.

The drink arrived a few minutes later, and Hannah took a sip. Slightly bitter, a little lemony. Cold going in and warm going down.

“How is it?” Mooney said.

“Good.”

As the drink disappeared, Hannah found herself becoming more and more animated. She’d never realized how funny and entertaining she could be. By the time the first drink was gone, Mooney had ordered her a replacement. After Hannah downed the second drink and just as the waitress set down a third, Mooney announced to the crowd that she was taking her maiden voyage into drunkenness.

“No kidding?” Tanner said to her. “You’ve never had a drink in your life?”

“Never,” Hannah slurred. She was light-headed and giddy, already drunk. “Not a single one single time.”

Mooney raised his glass.

“To virgins,” he said. “God bless them every one.”

The entire group laughed, but instead of joining them, Hannah began to sulk. As the alcohol clouded her judgment and dislodged her self-control, she began to grow angry. She wasn’t a prude, after all. She just couldn’t face the thought of a man discovering her reconstructed breast. He would ask questions and jostle rusty memories of death and sorrow. How dare Mr. Mooney make fun of her.

Hannah drained the third glass of vodka and slammed her glass down on the table.

“I am a virgin, you know!” she yelled drunkenly into Mooney’s ear. The rest of the group immediately went silent. “A real virgin! And I don’t appreciate you laughing at me!”