...And Never Let HerGo

wanted no part of it and she wanted to go home immediately.”
    “What was Debby doing?”
    “Debby was off the wall,” Tom said, his face expressing shock. “Debby—I had known Debby a long time. Debby was completely snapped. She was all red from the neck up. She was not coherent. I’m trying to explain to her that ‘This is not what you’re trying to make it out to be. Anne Marie and I are friends. You know, I have female friends.’ ”
    Tom testified that Debby wasn’t even listening to him. “She was starting to cry and she was saying, ‘All these years I’ve waited for you,’ and things that just didn’t need to be said.”
    “How long did this incident take?”
    “Which incident?” Tom had been so caught up in his own words. “I mean, what part of the incident?”
    “From the time she came in until the time you’re telling us about—the hollering, and . . .”
    Tom could not give an estimate.
    “All right,” Oteri said evenly. “Did something happen after you stood up?”
    “Yes.”
    “Tell the jury what happened.”
    “Debby shot Anne Marie,” Tom said flatly. “And it was absolutely, positively, and certainly accidental.”
    So there it was. The terrible accident. Tom stared ahead and stopped in the middle of his long explanation, seemingly unable to pick up the thread of his thoughts.
    “Tell the jury what happened, Tom,” Oteri urged.
    “She had bought this gun,” Tom said, now incorporating a number of elements that touched on previous testimony, “which she claims she gave to me, but she had bought this gun in May for self-protection. And she particularly made a point of having it with her if she went anyplace at night. Debby frightens very easily. And so she must have had the damned thing in her little carry thing, and the next thing I know I see the gun in her left hand—Debby is left-handed.
    “And Anne Marie even saw it and said, ‘Oh, my God,’ like making fun of it.
I
couldn’t even take it seriously. She never threatened me; she never threatened Anne Marie. She basically said things that were suicidal. You know, ‘After all this time, if I can’t have you and if you want somebody younger and prettier,’ and all that sort of stuff. She said, ‘I have nothing to live for. I might as well shoot myself.’ This is all the talk of somebody who had lost it,” Tom said confidently. “So—”
    “Where was the gun while she was doing this?” Oteri asked.But Tom’s testimony had become a virtual monologue; he seemed to have forgotten his lead defense attorney completely.
    Finally, he answered, “The gun was in her left hand, which was down. I didn’t think it was in any kind of threatening position.”
    “Not pointed at you or Anne Marie?”
    “No . . . and I, again, I looked in Anne Marie’s direction to see how far she was getting, and when I looked back to Debby, the left arm was coming up and I thought, Oh my God, she’s going to shoot herself! And so I reached out with my right hand to grab her left hand to pull the gun away from herself. And as I did that, a shot went off. I couldn’t believe it. And she couldn’t believe it either.”
    Tom said that even though Debby had “snapped,” she was able to tell him later that she didn’t have the clip in the gun. But a bullet had somehow come out.
    The Faheys sat rigid. Whether they believed Tom or not, it was the first time they had heard about their sister’s last moments. They listened for some information that might let them know she hadn’t suffered. That was the dread they had lived with.
    “I didn’t hear anything from Anne Marie,” Tom continued, scarcely taking a breath. “So I looked back to Anne Marie and she was motionless on the sofa. And I said, ‘No, this can’t be possible,’ and I checked her, and sure enough, she had a head wound on the right side of her head near her ear. And then I became a wreck. Debby became a wreck, too.”
    Tom said that he had pulled Anne Marie off the sofa and tried CPR, after Anne Marie didn’t respond to “little smacks to her face.”
    “I even got Debby involved in the CPR efforts.” He said he had put a pillow under Anne Marie’s head and looked for a flashlight to see if her eyes were dilated. “Or,” he asked himself aloud, “were they the opposite of ‘dilate’? No.
Dilate.
And they didn’t.”
    They had both worked over Anne Marie for a long time, Tom said, as long as there seemed to be any chance she was alive. Tom described