Chapter 9 - The Trial of Eleanor Aldridge
Cole took the plea on the fourth day.
His lawyer had seen the state police photographs of the senator’s study: the bolts drilled into the solid oak frame, the dark stains on the floorboards where Hannah had spilled her tea when the drugs made her hands shake, the scratches on the inside of the door where she had tried to scrape the felt away with a copper hairpin to hear her daughter’s voice.
He pleaded guilty to aggravated kidnapping, corporate fraud, and conspiracy to commit murder.
He was sentenced to twenty-two years at the Greensville Correctional Center. He would not be eligible for parole until he was sixty-one years old. When they led him away in the orange jumpsuit, he didn't look at his mother; he didn't look at his brother. He looked at the floor, his mouth moving silently as though he were trying to remember the words to a prayer he had forgotten in childhood.
Eleanor refused the plea.
She sat through the remaining six days of the trial like a stone figure on a tomb. She did not take the stand. She forbade her lawyers from calling character witnesses—the former governors, the bank presidents, the ladies of the Colonial Dames who had once eaten her watercress sandwiches.
The jury was out for forty-five minutes.
When they came back, the forewoman, a retired schoolteacher from Scottsville with ink stains on her fingers, read the verdict:
*Guilty of kidnapping in the first degree.*
*Guilty of obtaining property under false pretenses.*
*Guilty of child endangerment.*
*Guilty of tampering with public records.*
Judge Martin did not wait for a pre-sentencing report.
"Eleanor Aldridge," the judge said, leaning over the bench until his shadow fell across the defense table. "In forty years on the bench, I have seen men kill for passion, for money, and for drink. But I have rarely seen a human being so entirely devoid of natural affection, so blinded by the vanity of family name and the lust for acreage, that she would bury her own grandchild’s mother alive in her own house."
He adjusted his glasses.
"You will serve the rest of your natural life in the custody of the Virginia Department of Corrections," he said. "The sentence will be served at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women. And may God have more mercy on your soul than you showed to the daughter of your friend."
Eleanor didn't move. She didn't blink.
"Is that all, Your Honor?" she asked, her voice clear, cold, and level.
"That is all, Madam," the judge said.
She turned and walked out through the prisoner’s door between the two troopers. She did not look back at the gallery. She did not look at Grant, who was sitting in the third row with his arm around Hannah’s shoulders. She walked out with her back straight, her chin up, an Aldridge to the very end, entering an iron cage that was four feet narrower than the study where she had kept Hannah for two years.
We left the courthouse through the rear portico to avoid the television trucks.
The autumn air was crisp, smelling of burning leaves and the cold river coming down from the Blue Ridge. Grant held Lily on his shoulder; the child was playing with the brass buttons on his coat, pointing at the yellow school buses that were passing along the street.
"Where are we going now, Rosa?" Lily asked, leaning down to touch my hair.
"We’re going to the stone house, little bird," I said.
"Is the big door locked at the other house?" she asked.
Grant stopped on the red brick sidewalk. He looked at Hannah, then he looked at me.
"The big house doesn't have any doors anymore, Lily," Grant said softly. "The county took them all down. They’re going to turn the manor into a state park. For the trees. So people can walk through the woods and look at the river without anyone asking them for their name."
Hannah took my arm. Her fingers were light now, not clawing, not desperate. She was walking with a long, easy stride, the stride of a woman who had spent the last two months walking four miles every morning along the creek bank with her daughter and her husband.
"Rosa," Hannah said.
"Yes, child?"
"Tomorrow is Sunday."
"I know it," I said.
"Tomorrow we have the beef," she said. "The one with the peppercorns. But you don't make the gravy. Grant makes the gravy. I taught him how to brown the flour yesterday."
Grant groaned, smiling despite himself. "I burned the first batch, Rosa. It smelled like an old boot."
May you like
"Then you’ll burn the second batch, Grant," I said, stepping off the curb toward the station wagon that sat waiting in the shade of the courthouse maples. "And if you burn the third batch, we’ll eat the potatoes with butter and be glad that the smoke is coming out of an open window."
---
