Shame

who had been dragging her feet, afraid to look back. Now, unflinching, she needed to do just that.
    Lola applied another cold compress to Caleb’s forehead. He wasn’t as delirious now, though his temperature was still over 103.
    “Take another sip of this,” Lola insisted.
    Caleb dutifully took a sip. But he was only giving lip service, literally, to being there. Between the fever and listening to the recording, he had been drifting in and out of consciousness.
    At least he wasn’t doing those voices anymore, Lola thought. They had all but driven her from the house.
    “How about another sip for your Aunt Lola?”
    Caleb sipped again. And the MP3 player, and Elizabeth’s voice, played on.
    “Because Gray Parker had been tried for murder in the state of Florida, he had a bifurcated trial. The first part of the trial was the criminal hearing; the second part the penalty phase. With the overwhelming evidence against him, and because Parker had already admitted his guilt and was an advocate for his own death, there was little in the way of courtroom suspense, but the courtroom still proved to be anything but a dull place.
    “George Bernard Shaw wrote that ‘murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage.’ Parker, with his Hollywood looks and lively mind, was one of the first serial murderers to gain celebrity status. Despite the heinousness of his crimes, he was inundated with suggestive mail from women. His cell smelled like a perfumery from all the letters sealed with perfumed kisses, and his cell’s wallpaper consisted of hundreds of revealing photos that women had sent him. The prison turned away as much as it delivered, returning items it deemed obscene, along with a warning notice to the senders not to send such material again.
    “Even seemingly respectable women lost their sense of reason when it came to Parker. Many felt they could save him with their love and were willing to forgive his horrid past. All of the attention amused Parker. He was even moved to write a poem about one woman’s proposition to him:
    “Got another offer of marriage in the mail today,
    Woman said she wanted my hand,
    Said wasn’t no big thing where my hands had been before,
    Said she could understand my strangling some no-good whore.
    This woman sent along a photo of her in the raw,
    Said it was worth a thousand words,
    She had a body that would drop any jaw,
    And said when I was sprung she’d let me eat my words.
    All thousand of them.
    “But many women were not content to be only pen pals with Parker. They became regulars at his trials, spectators who swooned at his every glance, laughed too long at his every witticism, and cried too loudly at his reflections.
    “These trial groupies, what the press labeled as ‘Shame’s Dames’ or ‘Shame’s Gang,’ evidenced no respect for the victims or the families of victims. Their fawning over Parker mortified most observers. They appeared oblivious to reality. On those occasions when the prosecution took pains to detail the terrible things that Parker had done, their eyes remained dry and fixed on him even as the rest of the courtroom wept.
    “‘It was as if they were all hypnotized,’ said Lonnie Green, bailiff for most of the court proceedings. ‘They were kind of like that Manson Family, except instead of blindly committing murders, they blindly forgave them.’
    “To my mind the Shame gang were, and always will be, the ‘Tell Gray’ women. Because they knew I had access to Parker, virtually all of these women tried to enlist me as a go-between. ‘Tell Gray,’ they would always say to me. ‘Tell Gray.’ And though I reiterated time and again that I would pass on no messages, they never stopped asking me.
    “Leslie Van Doren was the most forward of the Shame groupies. Van Doren’s fixation on Parker was such that she had moved from her home state of Colorado to live in Florida for both of his trials.
    “Van Doren worked nights as a cocktail waitress, but by day she was a courtroom observer. Like so many other women in Shame’s Gang, she was quite attractive, a five-and-a-half-foot, curvaceous blonde. During the first trial her courtroom garb was very provocative. She liked wearing leather skirts and favored clinging, low-cut blouses. Van Doren rarely wore a bra. Usually she could be found leaning forward, showing off as much skin as possible, desperate to catch Parker’s eye.
    “Her shameless antics sometimes worked. When Parker would flash her a smile or