AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Antoinette didn’t give anything away.”
She answered the same questions I asked all the girls as if she’d received them beforehand and had time to think through her answers. She was concise, with a manner of speaking that gave me all the details and no information. “What else do we know about her?”
“In the interview, she said that she and Elizabethmetwhen they were both in their teens.”
“Yeah.”
Mani waggles his eyebrows. “Guess where they both were between the months of February and March in nineteen ninety?”
“Tell me.”
“Central Juvenile Hall.”
“They met in juvie?”
“Oh, yeah. Elizabeth for solicitation. Antoinette for ADW.”
“Assault?” I ask, failing to hide my surprise. The woman I met today didn’t seem like someone who’d go down for something as violent as assault with a deadly weapon.
“It wasn’t her first time being picked up.”
“Well, who did she assault?” I ask.
“Get this.” Mani clasps his hand behind his head. “Her mother’s boyfriend.”
“What?”
“Yeah. She stabbed him with a potato peeler in the kitchen of their apartment.Threetimes.”
“He pressed charges?”
“Nu-uh. James Smythe vanished from the hospital before the cops could interview him. Mom pressed charges.”
“Hermotherpressed charges against her?”
“Oh, yeah. Obviously, the courts got the gist of it, because Antoinette was charged as a minor even though she was about to turn eighteen.”
“Your seventeen-year-old daughter stabs your boyfriend with a potato peeler,heruns away, and your natural conclusion is thatshe’sthe one who needs to be locked up.”
I think about the woman I met earlier. Antoinette Rupetta looked like she’d just walked off the set of a movie where she played a hot-shot lawyer: Sleek, sophisticated, sharp. I try to picture her as a seventeen-year-old wielding a potato peeler. “How long were they in?”
“Elizabeth for about a month. She was released because there was insufficient evidence linking her to solicitation and she came from an all-American family. Her father was the preacher at one of those mega-churches. But Antoinette spent a year.”
“For assault? Their records weren’t sealed?”
“Oh, they were.”
“How did you get them so fast?”
“She gave them both to me?”
“What?”
“Oh, yeah. When I was walking them out, she handed them to me.”
He picks up two plastic file sleeves and hands them to me. One is green, the other red. When I open the red one, I see a wad of printed papers. The pages are paperclipped at the top, but color-coordinated tabs bookmark what I can only imagine are different reports and forms. “Mhm.” The sound I make is non-committal. “So, Antoinette and Elizabeth knew each other for eighteen years…”
Mani leans forward in his chair. “Come on. You’re not going to ask about Catherine Beauchamp?”
