Prologue
1996
June
In the beginning, I believed in second chances. How else could I account
for the fact that years ago, right after the accident – when the smoke
cleared and the car had stopped tumbling end over end to rest upside down
in a ditch – I was still alive; I could hear Elizabeth, my little girl,
crying? The police officer who had pulled me out of the car rode with me
to the hospital to have my broken leg set, with Elizabeth – completely
unhurt, a miracle – sitting on his lap the whole time. He’d held my hand
when I was taken to identify my husband Jack’s body. He came to the
funeral. He showed up at my door to personally inform me when the drunk
driver who ran us off the road was arrested.
The policeman’s name was Kurt Nealon. Long after the trial and the
conviction, he kept coming around just to make sure that Elizabeth and I
were all right. He brought toys for her birthday and Christmas. He fixed
the clogged drain in the upstairs bathroom. He came over after he was off
duty to mow the savannah that had once been our lawn.
I had married Jack because he was the love of my life; I had planned to be
with him forever. But that was before the definition of forever was
changed by a man with a blood alcohol level of .22.
I was surprised that Kurt seemed to understand that you might never love
someone as hard as you had the first time you’d fallen; I was even more
surprised to learn that maybe you could.
Five years later, when Kurt and I found out we were going to have a baby,
I almost regretted it – the same way you stand beneath a perfect blue sky
on the most glorious day of the summer and admit to yourself that all
moments from here on in couldn’t possibly measure up. Elizabeth had been
two when Jack died; Kurt was the only father she’d ever known. They had a
connection so special it sometimes made me feel I should turn away, that I
was intruding. If Elizabeth was the princess, then Kurt was her knight.
The imminent arrival of this little sister (how strange is it that none of
us ever imagined the new baby could be anything but a girl?) energized
Kurt and Elizabeth to fever pitch. Elizabeth drew elaborate sketches of
what the baby’s room should look like. Kurt hired a contractor to build
the addition. But then the builder’s mother had a stroke and he had to
move unexpectedly to Florida; none of the other crews had time to fit our
job into their schedules before the baby’s birth. We had a hole in our
wall and rain leaking through the attic ceiling; mildew grew on the soles
of our shoes.
When I was seven months pregnant, I came downstairs to find Elizabeth
playing in a pile of leaves that had blown past the plastic sheeting into
the living room. I was deciding between crying and raking my carpet when
the doorbell rang.
He was holding a canvas roll that contained his tools, something that
never left his possession, like another man might tote around his wallet.
His hair brushed his shoulders and was knotted. His clothes were filthy
and he smelled of snow – although it wasn’t the right season. Shay Bourne
arrived, unexpected, like a flyer from a summer carnival that blusters in
on a winter wind, making you wonder just where it’s been hiding all this
time.
He had trouble speaking – the words tangled, and he had to stop and
unravel them before he could say what he needed to say. “I want to …” he
began, and then started over: “Do you, is there, because …” The effort
made a fine sweat break out on his forehead. “Is there anything I can do?”
he finally managed, as Elizabeth came running toward the front door.
You can leave, I thought. I started to close the door, instinctively
protecting my daughter. “I don’t think so …”
Elizabeth slipped her hand into mine and blinked up at him. “There’s a lot
that needs to be fixed,” she said.
He got down to his knees then and spoke to my daughter easily – words
that had been full of angles and edges for him a minute before now flowed
like a waterfall. “I can help,” he replied.
Kurt was always saying people are never who you think they are, that it
was necessary to get a complete background check on a person before you
made any promises. I’d tell him he was being too suspicious, too much the
cop. After all, I had let Kurt himself into my life simply because he had
kind eyes and a good heart, and even he couldn’t argue with the results.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Shay. Shay Bourne.”
“You’re hired, Mr. Bourne,” I said, the beginning of the end.
SEVEN MONTHS LATER
Michael
Shay Bourne was nothing like I expected.
I had prepared myself for a hulking brute of a man, one with hammy fists
and no neck and eyes narrowed into slits. This was, after all, the crime
of the century – a double murder that had captured the attention of
people from Nashua to Dixville Notch; a crime that seemed all the worse
because of its victims: a little girl, and a police officer who happened
to be her stepfather. It was the kind of crime that made you wonder if you
were safe in your own house, if the people you trusted could turn on you
at any moment – and maybe because of this, New Hampshire prosecutors
sought the death penalty for the first time in fifty-eight years.
Given the media blitz, there was talk of whether twelve jurors who hadn’t
formed a reaction to this crime could even be found, but they managed to
locate us. They unearthed me in a study carrel at UNH, where I was writing
a senior honors thesis in mathematics. I hadn’t had a decent meal in a
month, much less read a newspaper – and so I was the perfect candidate
for Shay Bourne’s capital murder case.
The first time we filed out of our holding pen – a small room in the
superior courthouse that would begin to feel as familiar as my apartment
– I thought maybe some bailiff had let us into the wrong courtroom. This
defendant was small and delicately proportioned – the kind of guy who
grew up being the punch line to high school jokes. He wore a tweed jacket
that swallowed him whole, and the knot of his necktie squared away from
him at the perpendicular, as if it were being magnetically repelled. His
cuffed hands curled in his lap like small animals; his hair was shaved
nearly to the skull. He stared down at his lap, even when the judge spoke
his name and it hissed through the room like steam from a radiator.
The judge and the lawyers were taking care of housekeeping details when
the fly came in. I noticed this for two reasons: in March, you don’t see
many flies in New Hampshire, and I wondered how you went about swatting
one away from you when you were handcuffed and chained at the waist. Shay
Bourne stared at the insect when it paused on the legal pad in front of
him, and then in a jangle of metal, he raised his bound hands and crashed
them down on the table to kill it.
Or so I thought, until he turned his palms upward, his fingers opened one
petal at a time, and the insect went zipping off to bother someone else.
In that instant, he glanced at me, and I realized two things:
1. He was terrified.
2. He was approximately the same age that I was.
This double murderer, this monster, looked like the water polo team
captain who had sat next to me in an economics seminar last semester. He
resembled the deliveryman from the pizza place that had a thin crust, the
kind I liked. He even reminded me of the boy I’d seen walking in the snow
on my way to court, the one I’d rolled down my window for and asked if he
wanted a ride. In other words, he didn’t look the way I figured a killer
would look, if I ever ran across one. He could have been any other kid in
his twenties. He could have been me.
Except for the fact that he was ten feet away, chained at the wrists and
ankles. And it was my job to decide whether or not he deserved to live.
* * *
A month later, I could tell you that serving on a jury is nothing like you
see on TV. There was a lot of being paraded back and forth between the
courtroom and the jury room; there was bad food from a local deli for
lunch; there were lawyers who liked to hear themselves talk, and trust me,
the DAs were never as hot as the girl on Law & Order: SVU. Even after four
weeks, coming into this courtroom felt like landing in a foreign country
without a guidebook … and yet, I couldn’t plead ignorant just because I
was a tourist. I was expected to speak the language fluently.
Part one of the trial was finished: we had convicted Bourne. The
prosecution presented a mountain of evidence proving Kurt Nealon had been
shot in the line of duty, attempting to arrest Shay Bourne after he’d
found him with his stepdaughter, her underwear in Bourne’s pocket. June
Nealon had come home from her OB appointment to find her husband and
daughter dead. The feeble argument offered up by the defense – that Kurt
had misunderstood a verbally paralyzed Bourne; that the gun had gone off
by accident – didn’t hold a candle to the overwhelming evidence presented
by the prosecution. Even worse, Bourne never took the stand on his own
behalf – which could have been because of his poor language skills … or
because he was not only guilty as sin but such a wild card that his own
attorneys didn’t trust him.
We were now nearly finished with part two of the trial – the sentencing
phase – or in other words, the part that separated this trial from every
other criminal murder trial for the past half century in New Hampshire.
Now that we knew Bourne had committed the crime, did he deserve the death
penalty?
This part was a little like a Reader’s Digest condensed version of the
first one. The prosecution gave a recap of evidence presented during the
criminal trial; and then the defense got a chance to garner sympathy for a
murderer. We learned that Bourne had been bounced around the foster care
system. That when he was sixteen, he set a fire in his foster home and
spent two years in a juvenile detention facility. He had untreated bipolar
disorder, central auditory processing disorder, an inability to deal with
sensory overload, and difficulties with reading, writing, and language
skills.
We heard all this from witnesses, though. Once again, Shay Bourne never
took the stand to beg us for mercy.
Now, during closing arguments, I watched the prosecutor smooth down his
striped tie and walk forward. One big difference between a regular trial
and the sentencing phase of a capital punishment trial is who gets the
last word in edgewise. I didn’t know this myself, but Maureen – a really
sweet older juror I was crushing on, in a wish-you-were-my-grandma kind of
way – didn’t miss a single Law & Order episode, and had practically
earned her JD via Barcalounger as a result. In most trials, when it was
time for closing arguments, the prosecution spoke last … so that whatever
they said was still buzzing in your head when you went back to the jury
room to deliberate. In a capital punishment sentencing phase, though, the
prosecution went first, and then the defense got that final chance to
change your mind.
Because, after all, it really was a matter of life or death.
He stopped in front of the jury box. “It’s been fifty-eight years in the
history of the state of New Hampshire since a member of my office has had
to ask a jury to make a decision as difficult and as serious as the one
you twelve citizens are going to have to make. This is not a decision that
any of us takes lightly, but it is a decision that the facts in this case
merit, and it is a decision that must be made in order to do justice to
the memories of Kurt Nealon and Elizabeth Nealon, whose lives were taken
in such a tragic and despicable manner.”
He took a huge, eleven-by-fourteen photo of Elizabeth Nealon and held it
up right in front of me. Elizabeth had been one of those little girls who
seem to be made out of something lighter than flesh, with their filly legs
and their moonlight hair; the ones you think would float off the jungle
gym if not for the weight of their sneakers. But this photo had been taken
after she was shot. Blood splattered her face and matted her hair; her
eyes were still wide open. Her dress, hiked up when she had fallen, showed
that she was naked from the waist down. “Elizabeth Nealon will never learn
how to do long division, or how to ride a horse, or do a back handspring.
She’ll never go to sleepaway camp or her junior prom or high school
graduation. She’ll never try on her first pair of high heels or experience
her first kiss. She’ll never bring a boy home to meet her mother; she’ll
never be walked down a wedding aisle by her stepfather; she’ll never get
to know her sister, Claire. She will miss all of these moments, and a
thousand more – not because of a tragedy like a car accident or childhood
leukemia – but because Shay Bourne made the decision that she didn’t
deserve any of these things.”
He then took another photo out from behind Elizabeth’s and held it up.
Kurt Nealon had been shot in the stomach. His blue uniform shirt was
purpled with his blood, and Elizabeth’s. During the trial we’d heard that
when the paramedics reached him, he wouldn’t let go of Elizabeth, even as
he was bleeding out. “Shay Bourne didn’t stop at ending Elizabeth’s life.
He took Kurt Nealon’s life, as well. And he didn’t just take away Claire’s
father and June’s husband – he took away Officer Kurt Nealon of the
Lynley Police. He took away the coach of the Grafton County championship
Little League team. He took away the founder of Bike Safety Day at Lynley
Elementary School. Shay Bourne took away a public servant who, at the time
of his death, was not just protecting his daughter … but protecting a
citizen, and a community. A community that includes each and every one of
you.”
The prosecutor placed the photos facedown on the table. “There’s a reason
that New Hampshire hasn’t used the death penalty for fifty-eight years,
ladies and gentlemen. That’s because, in spite of the many cases that come
through our doors, we hadn’t seen one that merited that sentence. However,
by the same token, there’s a reason why the good people of this state have
reserved the option to use the death penalty … instead of overturning the
capital punishment statute, as so many other states have done. And that
reason is sitting in this courtroom today.”
My gaze followed the prosecutor’s, coming to rest on Shay Bourne. “If any
case in the past fifty-eight years has ever cried out for the ultimate
punishment to be imposed,” the attorney said, “this is it.”
College is a bubble. You enter it for four years and forget there is a
real world outside of your paper deadlines and midterm exams and beer-pong
championships. You don’t read the newspaper – you read textbooks. You
don’t watch the news – you watch Letterman. But even so, bits and
snatches of the universe manage to leak in: a mother who locked her
children in a car and let it roll into a lake to drown them; an estranged
husband who shot his wife in front of their kids; a serial rapist who kept
a teenager tied up in a basement for a month before he slit her throat.
The murders of Kurt and Elizabeth Nealon were horrible, sure – but were
the others any less horrible?
Shay Bourne’s attorney stood up. “You’ve found my client guilty of two
counts of capital murder, and he’s not contesting that. We accept your
verdict; we respect your verdict. At this point in time, however, the
state is asking you to wrap up this case – one that involves the death of
two people – by taking the life of a third person.”
I felt a bead of sweat run down the valley between my shoulder blades.
“You’re not going to make anyone safer by killing Shay Bourne. Even if you
decide not to execute him, he’s not going anywhere. He’ll be serving two
life sentences without parole.” He put his hand on Bourne’s shoulder.
“You’ve heard about Shay Bourne’s childhood. Where was he supposed to
learn what all the rest of you had a chance to learn from your families?
Where was he supposed to learn right from wrong, good from bad? For that
matter, where was he even supposed to learn his colors and his numbers?
Who was supposed to read him bedtime stories, like Elizabeth Nealon’s
parents had?”
The attorney walked toward us. “You’ve heard that Shay Bourne has bipolar
disorder, which was going untreated. You heard that he suffers from
learning disabilities, so tasks that are simple for us become unbelievably
frustrating for him. You’ve heard how hard it is for him to communicate
his thoughts. These all contributed to Shay making poor choices – which
you agreed with, beyond a reasonable doubt.” He looked at each of us in
turn. “Shay Bourne made poor choices,” the attorney said. “But don’t
compound that by making one of your own.”
June
It was up to the jury. Again.
It’s a strange thing, putting justice in the hands of twelve strangers. I
had spent most of the sentencing phase of the trial watching their faces.
There were a few mothers; I would catch their eye and smile at them when I
could. A few men who looked like maybe they’d been in the military. And
the boy, the one who barely looked old enough to shave, much less make the
right decision.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Change of Heart
by Jodi Picoult
Copyright © 2008 by Jodi Picoult .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Atria
Copyright © 2008
Jodi Picoult
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7434-9674-2
