Saving Emma

by Allen Eskens

Genres: Suspense; Thrillers

Synopsis

A lawyer's race to reveal a wrongful conviction collides with the dark shadow of a murder in his own home in this propulsive and perfectly-plotted thriller from award-winning writer Allen Eskens.

When Boady Sanden first receives the case of Elijah Matthews, he’s certain there’s not much he can do. Elijah, who believes himself to be a prophet, has been locked up in a psychiatric hospital for the past four years, convicted of brutally murdering the pastor of a megachurch. But as a law professor working for the Innocence Project, Boady agrees to look into Elijah’s file. When he does, he is alarmed to find threads that lead back to the death of his colleague and friend, Ben Pruitt, a man shot to death four years earlier in Boady’s own home.
 
Ben’s daughter, Emma, has lived with Boady and Boady’s wife Dee ever since that awful night. Now fourteen years old, Emma has been growing distant, and soon makes a fateful choice that takes her far from the safety of her godparents. Desperate to bring her home, and to free an innocent man, Boady must do all he can to investigate Elijah’s case while fighting to save the family he has deeply come to love.
 
Written with energy, propulsion, and his characteristic pathos and insight, Eskens delivers another pitch-perfect legal thriller that reveals a twisted murder and explores faith, love, family, and redemption along the way.

Release date: September 19, 2023

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 304

Sample

I hold no faith in distant memories. To me they are as trustworthy as the boards of an aging footbridge, the planks heavy with decay. Time can corrupt a memory, spoil its shape, its color, its truth, wear it down to the point that it’s barely recognizable.

For example, for many years I treasured a memory of my father. He died when I was still quite young, but I could picture the back of his head, his strong hands, when he’d carried me on his broad shoulders. It took me years to admit that image was stolen from a photo of us I’d found in my mother’s closet, that my memory was only a fantasy born of my need to feel his presence.

When I went to college, and later law school, I allowed logic to blow out the last remaining flicker of that candle, my ersatz memories traded for reason. Truth wasn’t truth unless I could hold it in my hand or usher it safely through a gauntlet of logical debate. And although I sometimes mourned the loss of that part of me that could believe just for the sake of believing, I eagerly put it aside.

And so, I feel somewhat duplicitous writing down this account of those ten strange days, which, even with all the reason and logic and training I can muster, I still can’t explain. Where does one turn when logic fails? And I worry that years from now this memory, too, might bear little resemblance to the truth. Will I come to embrace what has happened, or will I deny it? All I know is that I cannot trust time to bring clarity, yet I feel too close to it all right now to make sense of it.

For that reason, I’ve decided to put pen to paper, to capture my most accurate version of the truth before it fades from my mind, and hope there comes a day where I can look back with some new perspective on the ordeal of those ten days, an ordeal that began when I met Ruth Matthews.

I was in my office at the law school, grading Criminal Procedure exams—my least favorite part about being a professor—when she showed up at my door. My first glimpse of Ruth was like taking notice of a moth—she appeared quietly, her clothing and demeanor faded, like dust on a wing. A slightly plump woman with hair the color of fireplace ash, she wore a gray sweater buttoned to the throat despite the warm June day, and a brown skirt that brushed the tops of her shoes as she walked.

The one thing that stood out was the metal crucifix that hung on a leather cord around her neck. Thick and heavy, it looked more like a yoke than an adornment. As big as my hand, it had been made of two steel bars crudely welded together. Ruth brushed her fingers across it as she stood timidly in my office doorway.

“Professor Sanden?” she asked in a voice so soft that it barely carried the short distance to my desk.

“Yes?”

“I’m Miss Matthews… I have an appointment.”

I had forgotten about the appointment but stood and smiled as if I had been waiting. “Please, call me Boady.” I waved her to the visitor’s chair and tried to recall our brief phone call. She had a husband… no, a brother who had been convicted of murder and she was looking for help from the Innocence Project.

I had once been the director of the Innocence Project, but handed the baton off when it became a full-time job. Now I handled cases only as a volunteer attorney. Because I was just finishing my spring semester and I had no classes to teach that summer, I’d decided to take a look at her case.

Ruth came in and sat, clutching the heavy steel cross against her chest.

“That’s a… striking necklace you have there.”

“I made it myself,” she said, beaming. “I sell jewelry to help support my brother’s ministry. Would you like one?”

“I’m not a jewelry person,” I said, brushing the stack of essays to the side. “So, this is about… your brother?”

“Elijah, yes. He was convicted of a murder, but he’s innocent.”

They all are, I thought. “When was the conviction?”

“Four years ago.”

“Do you know if there was an appeal?”

“I think so, yes.”

I swiveled to face my computer. “His last name?”

“Matthews… like mine.”

I typed State of Minnesota v. Elijah Matthews into a database of appellate cases. If it was a jury trial for murder, it had likely been appealed. I could get the basic facts of the case from the Court of Appeals decision. The case popped up.

The first paragraph gave the procedural posture, a description of the trial, and how the case came to be at the Court of Appeals. I was only a couple sentences in when I read the name of the attorney who took Elijah’s case to trial: Ben Pruitt. The name reached up from the page to wrap its cold dead fingers around my throat. Looking at the date, I realized that Elijah’s case had probably been Ben’s last before his world collapsed and he took a bullet to the chest.

I turned back to Ruth, ready to tell her that I couldn’t take the case. Four years and it was still too soon. She held my gaze as she rubbed her thumb up the center of her crucifix. It was then that I noticed a single word etched into the metal: FAITH.

Had she had faith in Ben Pruitt when he took Elijah’s case to trial? She would have been better off putting her faith in the toss of a coin.

I turned back to my computer and began reading again. Her brother had been accused of killing a pastor at a megachurch, a man named Jalen Bale. I read further and saw that Elijah had prevailed in his insanity defense after claiming to be a prophet doing God’s work.

I swiveled to face Ruth. “He was found not guilty by reason of insanity.”

“And yet he’s locked up,” she said coldly.

“At the Security Hospital in St. Peter. It’s not a prison.”

“Why is he locked up if he was found not guilty?”

“Not guilty by reason of insanity,” I said. “He had what’s called a bifurcated trial. In the first phase, the jury determines if the State proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed the act—the murder. After that, there is a second phase to decide if he was so impaired by some mental deficit that he shouldn’t be held accountable for the crime.”

“But he didn’t do it.”

I put on my mask of empathy, which I’d often worn when I spent my days in the courtroom advocating for people like Ruth’s brother. “According to this case, your brother believes he’s a prophet—as in the Prophet Elijah… from the Bible.”

“My brother is a prophet. He speaks for God.”

I held a flat expression, resisting the urge to roll my eyes. “Do you understand what it means that your brother was found to be not guilty by reason of insanity?”

“My brother’s not insane, Mr. Sanden. I assure you of that.”

“The judge in his case would beg to differ.”

“And I am bound by my faith to forgive that judge, for he knew not what he was doing.”

This time I closed my eyes to hide my expression, took in a slow breath, then looked at Ruth again. “Your brother was determined to be so affected by a mental illness that he didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t know that killing that man was a crime. The psychiatric experts who testified at his trial don’t take that kind of determination lightly.”

“Of course they’re going to find him insane,” Ruth said. “If someone in the tenth century had tried to explain gravity, they’d have been locked up too. People are like beetles crawling on the floor of a symphony hall, unable to comprehend the greatness of the music around them. You can’t fault them for not realizing. They don’t know any better.”

I had ungraded exams on my desk, and here I was discussing bugs and symphonies with a woman who believed her brother to be a prophet. “Miss Matthews, do you know how the Innocence Project works?”

She looked at me with unwavering eyes and said, “Mr. Sanden, contrary to what you may think, I am not an idiot.”

The moth had some steel in her spine. “I never said you were, but, Miss Matthews, we have a limited budget.” I turned back to my computer to peruse the case again. “We normally need substantial new evidence of innocence, like DNA. We have to find something strong enough to reopen Elijah’s case. I need more than just a belief that your brother is innocent.”

“It’s not a belief, Mr. Sanden, it’s the truth.”

“According to the facts…” I pointed at my computer screen, which she couldn’t see. “The victim was killed with a rock that had your brother’s DNA on it.”

“His DNA was on that rock because he had handled it. He’d brought it as a gift! He didn’t use it as a weapon.”

“As he lay dying, the victim wrote your brother’s name in his blood. That’s a bit on the nose.”

“Every problem looks like a nail if all you have is a hammer.”

“I don’t even know what you mean by that,” I said.

“They wanted to convict Elijah, so they interpreted all the evidence to reach that conclusion.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I can’t devote resources to a case unless I have something to show that the jury got it wrong. You don’t happen to have anything like that, do you?”

Ruth Matthews gave a light nod and opened her purse. “I have this,” she said, handing me two pieces of paper.

I unfolded them and saw one was a newspaper article about a magician scheduled to visit the Hennepin County Library. The article had a picture of a man in his forties standing before a herd of kids. The man had a clownish top hat and a cape, and he held a string of colorful handkerchiefs tied together—performing the end of a trick.

The second piece of paper was an email, which read:

My dear sister,

I have done what has been asked of me. What happens now is God’s will.

Elijah

I turned the paper over, expecting more but finding nothing. “What am I looking at?”

“The date of the email.”

I compared the date on the email to the date of Pastor Bale’s murder. They matched. “Okay,” I said. “The email was purportedly sent the same day as the murder.”

“Not just the same day but the same time.”

“Emails can be programmed to be sent on a given date and time, so…”

“He sent the email from a computer at the downtown library. Elijah was at that library when Pastor Bale was killed.”

“It’s a Gmail account. It could have been sent from anywhere.”

“It could have, but it wasn’t. Look at the picture.” She pointed at the newspaper article.

The magician appeared to be in a meeting room at the library. Seeing nothing else of interest, I shrugged.

“Not that one.” Ruth leaned across my desk, plucked the article from my hand, and slapped it down. “Look!” She pointed at a smaller picture at the bottom of the page showing the magician next to a small “Events” sign at the reference desk.

I shook my head. “Okay… and?”

“The man sitting at that table in the background—that’s Elijah.”

I looked closer and saw a thin man with white hair, possibly balding but too far in the background to make out any specifics. The man sat hunched forward as though reading.

As I studied the photo, Ruth pulled another picture from her purse and slid it into my line of sight. It was a photo of a smallish man with white hair. “This is my brother, Elijah,” she said. “And that’s him in the library.”

I studied the two pictures, but there was no way to say for certain that they were one and the same. “This really doesn’t prove anything,” I said at last.

“It proves that Elijah couldn’t have killed Pastor Bale. He had an alibi.”

“The jury found him guilty, so I have to assume they didn’t believe his alibi.”

“The jury didn’t hear about the alibi.”

I eased back into my chair and crossed one leg over the other, a move that gave me a moment to process this curveball. Could Ben really have missed something as important as an alibi? I didn’t want to believe it, but then again, I didn’t want to believe much of what I had learned about Ben that year.

“Ben didn’t—I mean, your brother’s attorney didn’t present the alibi to the jury?”

“No.”

Ben, did you really fuck this up that badly? “Did the attorney ask your brother if he had an alibi?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”

“But… you had this email. You could have said something?”

“If Elijah wanted my assistance, he would have asked for it. I don’t interfere with his ministry without his guidance.”

“Interfere? If this alibi is valid, you could have put a stop to everything.”

“What happened to my brother was God’s will.”

“No. It was the judge’s will. It was a court order that committed your brother, not God.”

Ruth shook her head as if I didn’t understand anything. “Mr. Sanden, my brother went to that hospital because God sent him there.”

“If God sent him there… then why come to me?”

“Because God has spoken to Elijah. The time is coming for him to continue his mission elsewhere.”

“If that’s the case…” I heard the sentence form in my head before I said it, but I felt powerless to stop myself. “Why not just have God knock the walls down, like he did in Jericho? You don’t need me for this.”

Ruth didn’t seem insulted, although she had the right. Instead, she gave a subtle shake of her head, a gesture that came across as pity. “It’s like trying to explain a symphony to a beetle.”

Then she stood, placed her fingertips against the heavy cross around her neck, and closed her eyes. Her lips moved softly as she murmured something. When she opened her eyes again, she smiled at me and said, “I know you’ll help Elijah. I can feel the Spirit moving in you already.”

On that score, she could not have been more wrong.

Then she made her way out of my office, pausing at the door to say, “Have a blessed day.”

After she left, I went back to grading exams, but I couldn’t concentrate. I felt angry, and I wasn’t sure why. I leaned back in my chair and stared up at the plaster ceiling. The man thought he was a prophet. I pictured him wandering the streets, lost in delusion, shouting incoherent ramblings at people who rushed past not making eye contact. I couldn’t help but think that Elijah Matthews should stay in the Security Hospital. Surely that was the safest place for a man who followed the commands of a voice in his head?

But I was also thinking about my own days in Catholic school, where the nuns would preach God’s love on Monday and then slap us in class on Tuesday. Was I letting my own baggage interfere with my judgment? How many times had I told my students that passions and prejudices had no place in the law? Facts, and statutes, and legal precedents, those were the stones we used to build our fortresses.

For my own peace of mind, I would look into this case, do my due diligence before writing Elijah Matthews off.

I picked up the picture from the library. I needed to nail down Pastor Bale’s time of death and verify whether or not this man was Elijah Matthews. It shouldn’t take long to punch a hole in Elijah’s supposed alibi. Although I had no official quitting time, I felt restless and decided to work on the case at home. A few hours of research in my quiet study, I thought, and I could put Ruth and Elijah Matthews behind me.

If only it had been that easy.

Our home on Summit Avenue wasn’t a mansion, but it held its own. Not far down the street from the governor’s residence and other esteemed houses that carried the names of men who constructed mills and railroads at the turn of the century, ours was a Victorian built in 1891 by a man who had made his fortune selling hats. It had a large stone porch, windowed turrets, and intricately carved gables. It was a house you might walk by and think, A man must have his life together to live in a place like that. The first time I’d seen it, I had certainly thought that. Glance our way as you passed by, maybe catch us in silhouette through a window, and you might assume us to be the epitome of an American family: father, mother, and daughter, every thread of this fine tapestry carefully woven. But these days I knew: One step closer and you’d see that we more accurately resembled a poorly stitched quilt.

You would see that my wife, Dee, and I are of different races, she Black and me white, which isn’t as big of a deal now as it was back when we first got together. You would see the gray that peppered my brown beard and the silver that twined through my wife’s black hair, and think that we looked too old to have that fourteen-year-old child. And then you would notice that Emma holds no resemblance to either of us at all. Her hair shines with a hint of red and her features are fine. But it all would make sense once you understood that Emma was not our flesh-and-blood daughter; she had been our ward for the past four years.

When I pulled into our driveway, Dee and Emma were nestled on the front porch, sitting close together in our Adirondack chairs, heads tipped, eyes focused on something on Dee’s lap. Emma was small for fourteen and looked even smaller curled up next to Dee. She had a smile on her face until she saw me pull in, at which point she retreated blankly back to whatever they were looking at. I tried to pretend that I didn’t notice, but this was a reaction I had been seeing more of in Emma lately.

I parked beside the house, the warm summer evening nice enough that I left my car outside of the garage. Entering the house through the side door, I grabbed a glass of water from the tap and three oatmeal cookies from the cookie jar, a peace offering for a conflict I didn’t understand, and headed out to the porch.

“Hey, ladies,” I said in my cheeriest voice. “Who wants a cookie?”

Dee greeted me with her big smile and an outstretched hand for the cookie, but Emma didn’t even look up. Over their shoulders I could see that Dee held Emma’s sketchbook in her lap, open to a picture of our dog, Rufus, a black Lab, beautifully drawn. I looked at the sketch and then at Rufus, who lay on his rug on the other end of the porch. The sketch was spot-on.

“Remarkable,” I said, setting Emma’s cookie on the side table. “I love how you captured the light shining on his coat.”

Emma stiffened in her chair but said nothing. It was as if the mere sound of my voice clawed at her skin. Dee noticed it too, but she covered her disappointment with quick support. “Hasn’t she drawn it perfectly?” She slid a hand onto Emma’s stiff shoulders, and with Dee’s gentle compliment Emma relaxed a bit.

There had been a time, even just earlier this year, when Emma would spend her evenings in my study with me, sitting in one of my Queen Anne chairs with her legs crossed and her homework on her lap. I had offered to bring in a desk for her, but she always said she preferred the chair. But in the past few weeks, something had shifted. Last week, as she’d finished her last year of middle school, she studied for her exams up in her room.

And that wasn’t the only change. She’d started searching for reasons not to eat with us at the dinner table, and when I forced her to take her seat, she acted like she was a hostage, her head slumped down, hair covering her face. At first, I’d brushed it off; Emma was a teenager, after all. They were supposed to be sullen. But I was beginning to worry this was more than normal teenage angst.

So I’d been trying to hold out an olive branch. A week ago, I had offered to take her to Como Park again so she could sketch—she’d had fun there last November, drawing a bonsai tree in the arboretum. But when I asked, she said no thanks and locked herself in her room. Two days ago, I asked her what type of pie she wanted me to get at the grocery store, a question that used to put a smile on her face. But all she said was “It doesn’t matter.”

As I looked at her perfect rendering of Rufus, I tried again. “Maybe we should send you to art school in the fall. Or maybe private classes? You really are talented.”

“No thanks,” she said, standing and taking her sketch pad back from Dee, who let it go somewhat reluctantly. “I wouldn’t want to be a burden.”

Emma walked past me and into the house, Rufus jumping to his feet to follow her. I watched through the window as they climbed the stairs. “She’s going to her room again,” I said. “I don’t get it—what’d I do wrong?”

Dee and I had had this conversation each of the last few nights, so she merely shook her head and took a tepid nibble from her cookie.

“Does she say anything to you… about me?”

“No,” Dee said with a sigh. “I try and get her to open up, but…”

“She was smiling when I drove in. Then she saw me.”

I knew Dee didn’t want to hurt me, but even she couldn’t deny that was true. Instead, she crouched to pick up a scrunched piece of thick white paper from under her chair. A page from the sketch pad. She unfolded it to reveal a drawing of the three of us, a re-creation of a photo we took last summer at a colleague’s barbecue. We were seated at a picnic table eating corn on the cob, pausing only to smile for the shot. Emma’s sketch was an excellent likeness. I looked at the drawing, then at Dee.

“She said she didn’t like this one,” Dee said. “Tore it from the book.”

“Why?”

“She didn’t say, and I didn’t push it. You know how she dodges things.”

I looked away. It had been a wet spring and the lawn was a vibrant green. Two squirrels chased each other from one tree to another and birds flitted about. Soon, evening would fall and the yard would become dotted with fireflies. It was picture perfect, but none of that tranquility could erase the heaviness in my chest.

“When you were her age,” I asked, “were you… I mean… is this normal teenage stuff?”

“No,” Dee whispered. “And I can’t help but think it goes back to that last visitation with Anna. It seems to me, that’s when the attitude started.”

Visitation. Just the thought of that word made me want to spit. It had been a little over a month since Emma spent a week with her Aunt Anna, and it was true: Ever since that visit, Emma hadn’t been the same.

“You don’t think that Anna told her about… Ben… and everything?” I asked.

I was stepping into territory that Dee and I had grown to avoid. Emma knew bits and pieces of the truth; she knew that her mother had been murdered and that her father, Ben Pruitt, once my best friend and law partner, had gone on trial for that murder. She knew that her father died before the trial resolved, shot by a police detective. But what she didn’t know—what we had so far kept from her—was that Ben had been shot while in my study, after happily laying out in detail how he had killed Emma’s mother. Most of those details remained buried in police reports, filed away after Ben died, the shooting deemed justified by an investigator from the Attorney General’s office. Dee and I had always planned on telling Emma the full story, but Emma had been through so much. And how do you drag a ten-year-old girl through such horrors? There are no self-help books out there for that.

Because I was Emma’s godfather, and had been granted temporary custody while Ben wa. . .