“I’m taking back the last word, Raul.”
Leaving Raul with a final kiss, she was led down her sidewalk while Miss Posey tut-tutted and gawked at her. Sam was jailed two hours later.
Chapter 29
When Sam was ten, after a scolding for stealing a tube of Avon Double Dare Red lipstick from her mother’s vanity and using it to color Valentine cards for her parents, she packed her Captain Kangaroo Tasket Basket with the pet frog her parents didn’t know she kept in her bedroom. Then she wrapped herself in her favorite handknitted blanket, stuffed a sleeve of Saltines in her pocket, and slipped out the back door, determined to run away forever.
Sam had run almost a mile in the February cold before she looked back to find her father before he slunk into the bushes, barely out of sight but eyes locked on her. Half a mile later she stopped, turned around, and ran into her father’s open—and shivering—arms.
She knew in that moment she would never truly be alone; her father would always watch over her, no matter how far she strayed. Sitting rigidly in the police department interrogation room, all she could wonder was what her father was thinking as he watched her from above. Knowing what she knew now, a single sentence kept echoing in her mind:
I should have kept running.
“Do you understand the charges, Miss Stanton?” the detective was asking her.
A vent in the ceiling of the interrogation room blasted lukewarm air that did nothing to temper the chill. The coffee he had offered her tasted bitter and almost as lukewarm as the air.
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“You’re being charged with theft.”
“Theft? I thought it was forgery.”
“Do you want me to add forgery to the list?” he asked with an upward tug of his sliding-down pants that looked two sizes too small for his potbelly waist.
“And what about the slander?”
“Slander on top of the theft and forgery? You really know how to go all the way, lady.”
“Who is pressing the charges?” Sam sighed wearily.
Her brain buzzed from being overloaded with police jargon, and her rear ached from sitting in the metal chair for too long.
“It says here Thomas Cook is pressing charges for theft. As for the forgery, I don’t know about that. Probably the district attorney.”
“So there are two different charges from two different people?”
“That’s correct, ma’am.”
“Let me get this straight: Cook formally accused me of stealing his top-secret ledger. And someone else backtracked and accused me of forging that same ledger?”
The detective’s face screwed up. “Yes, that’s also correct.”
“Is there any evidence of either crime?”
“Well, no. Only his word against yours. And you admitted to stealing it.”
“Exactly! I’m pleading guilty to larceny, which is a worse crime than forgery. So then how can both be correct? I either stole it or I falsified it! Which one is it?”
“I… I… I’m going to get my boss to talk to you, ma’am.”
But the police corporal above him, and the lieutenant above him didn’t seem to know anything more as each one couldn’t tell Sam exactly what she was being arrested for. To Sam it didn’t seem as if anyone knew what they were charging her with, who was leading the charge, or why.
“First my name is smeared all over the media for stealing a ledger that exposes Cook Pharmaceuticals paying off doctors to prescribe drugs to patients. Only after that did someone else come out saying the ledger is in fact fake. But why would I have stolen a blank ledger when I could have easily bought one? And how would I have known how to fill it out? None of this makes any sense.”
“You’re telling me,” the officer agreed.
“At the least you should be looking into both sides, since his crime of bribery is far worse than mine. So why isn’t he sitting in this room being interrogated as well?”
“We already questioned him and he said he’s innocent.”
“And that worked?” Sam shook her head sadly. “So you think that I’m so brilliant that I could procure hundreds of dates, doctor names, prescription drugs, dosage amounts, and payments all on my own, all perfectly imitating Thomas Cook’s handwriting of course. Because I bet if you look into each of those payments, they’ll match an exact prescription made by the exact doctor named for the exact date listed. That data is not lying; Thomas Cook is!”
Any intelligent person could see the flaws in their presumptions, except for them. So Sam decided to take the simple tactic that would almost certainly meet their standard of logic.
