Author: admin

” ‘There is one more thing, Your Honor,’ I said.” From Anatomy of a Murder, by Robert Traver, p. 259.

* * *

“There is one more thing, Your Honor,” I said.

“Yes, Mr. Turling?”

“Your Honor, the defense calls Fenton Walker, Jr.”

Judge Kilwin looked up from the papers he was shuffling and peered sternly at me over his glasses, one eyebrow raised. “Approach.”

I strode to the podium, the assistant state’s attorney clacking behind me in her high heels. She’d been flipping through notes for her closing argument. She thought we were done. We weren’t done.

The ASA pushed a piece of hair behind her ear and glared at me before starting in. “Your Honor, this witness was not disclosed. And frankly, I’m not sure what he could possibly offer. The defendant himself told the police that his son was not at home on the night of June 8, 2009, and the neighbor, Mrs. … Mrs. …”

“Fairview,” I offered, trying to be helpful.

“Mrs. Fairview. She testified that Fenton Jr., “Fen,” I think she called him, was sleeping over at her house that night. He was in the basement with her son Carl, playing video games. She checked on them at 9 p.m. and again just after midnight. Your honor, this is a pretty transparent effort, in my view, to garner sympathy from the jury–to say, hey, look at this poor boy who will grow up without a father if you find the defendant guilty. The time for that is at sentencing, not at a jury trial for first degree murder. I would ask …”

Judge Kilwin had heard enough. “Mr. Turling? Your response?”

“Rebuttal witness, Your Honor.”

“And what, exactly, will the young Mr. Walker be rebutting?”

“Your Honor, Officer May, the forensic evidence tech, testified that he found a blue Fila hat at the scene of the crime. Fen is gong to testify that his father owned no such hat.”

“That’s it?” The judge seemed confused.

“That’s it.”

“Fine. Get him up there, get your answer and get him down. We’re not parading family members around now. This trial is almost over with.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

The ASA looked disgusted.

[To be continued …]

“It was a face to which almost any door would have opened of its own accord.” The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, p. 96

* * *

It was a face to which almost any door would have opened of its own accord. The boy’s thick brown hair, standing up in crests, was dented in the front from the rim of the baseball hat he held in one hand. He had mischievous eyes, cheeks still flushed from the game, a broad smile, and a dimpled chin. Claire stared at him. And then she chided herself. She could be his mother.

Standing next to the boy was a smaller version of himself–same smile, same hair, the ears sticking out a bit from under his hat—what the boy looked like two years ago, Claire guessed. And then he’d grown into the ears, shot up a foot, and adopted a grown person’s manners. “Hi ma’am, I’m Joe, and this is my brother Paul. We’re looking to do some yardwork around the neighborhood this summer. Mowing and weeding, mostly. We can do leaves in the fall too.”

Claire recognized him then: Joey Granger. Theresa Granger’s oldest child. How was that possible? She remembered him, at four or five years old, pedaling around the block on a little blue tricycle. The Granger’s had that massive dog. A Saint Bernard, maybe? And they’d let little Joey have the reign of the neighborhood, knowing the dog would never leave his side. Claire had a vision of the dog’s massive paw pressing on the front fender of the tricycle, stopping the boy from pedaling out into the street.

“Joey, my god, I’m Claire Forster, I used to be friends with your mother.” His face underwent some barely perceptible transformation. “But that was so long ago. Didn’t you all move out to Fox Hills?”

“We did ma’am.” He shifted the duffel bag full of baseball equipment from one shoulder to the other. The younger boy bit his lip and studied the tip of his shoe, grinding it into the pavement in a rocking motion.

“We moved back here a few months ago, though,”  the boy explained.

“Not into the same house?” Claire remembered with a tinge of jealousy the beautiful old timber and stone Craftsman with the eyebrow dormers.

“No, but it’s the same street.”

“Oh, your mother must be so pleased! She always loved that block.” The boys stared at her, as if she’d suggested something obscene. Claire felt herself smiling stiffly, a twinge of uncertainty now playing at the corner of her mouth.

“No, ma’am.”

“No?” She felt something inside her sink and then settle again.

“Our mom is … she died. Last year. She got cancer.” The boy blinked, pretended to look down the block.

“Oh my god. I’m so sorry, Joey.” She hadn’t meant to call him that. It was too familiar, a little boy’s name.

He turned and looked her right in the eye. “So do you need some help with your yard, ma’am? I mean, Mrs. Forster?”

“He rode over the drawbridge into the great courtyard, and the echo of his horse’s hoof beats was the only sound that greeted him.” From Stories of the Knights of the Round Table, by Henry Gilbert, p. 106.

* * *

He rode over the drawbridge into the great courtyard, and the echo of his horse’s hoof beats was the only sound that greeted him. With a tug of the reigns the horse reared up and whinnied, eyes bulging and nostrils flaring. Faldo scanned the courtyard’s perimeter, shaded by the massive timber balconies above. Matching his movement, the horse turned in a slow, wary circle. Something was wrong.

The last time Faldo had set foot in this courtyard it had been bursting with noise, on the first market day of spring. People from the surrounding towns had flung off the stinking furs of a long, dark winter, scrubbed themselves pink in the brooks and streams, and donned clean linen breaches and tight-laced kirtles. They’d traveled for days, then waited in long queues to gain entry to the massive courtyard. Once inside the near-circular enclosure, goods were arrayed by type, in baskets and barrels, on makeshift tables, and in the backs of wagons. There were spring vegetables and herbs, mounds of cut flowers, wood carvings and ironworks toiled over in the cold months, embroidery, skeins of wool, beeswax candles, pies and cakes, gleaming jars of new honey, and baskets of speckled blue and brown eggs.

Children chased each other between the wagons and stalls, tossing hoops and balls, or clattering together in mock battle with rough wooden swords. Performers were generally relegated to the grounds outside the castle, but the odd juggler or stilt-walker still made his way through the crowd, knowing that folks were more apt to part with their coins before they’d buried them in their pockets than after.

A sudden motion made Faldo spin in his saddle. He squinted, peering into the heaps of discarded wood and moldering bales of hay stacked in the shadow of the far stone wall. A cat, piebald, with one ice-blue eye, sat on an old barrel, twitching its tail seductively. It was thin, half-starved probably, but he recognized it all the same. It was the seer’s cat.

He could picture her now, the old woman with the gnarled fingers full of rings, gold filigree and blood-red rubies stacked next to bands of braided wheatgrass and twine–totemic looking things. He remembered how her eyes, so like those of her cat, had given him such a start in the dim candlelight of her smoke-filled tent. It was just there, he thought, at the edge of the courtyard, that she’d taken his own hand in hers and told him. Told him everything. That this would come to pass. that he would live to see this place hushed, full of ghosts. And now he had.

“Lady Brackenstall was no ordinary person.” From “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, p. 608.

* * *

Lady Brackenstall was no ordinary person. Those given to superstition indeed questioned whether she was a person at all, and not some phantasmal presence clinging to the creaking hallways and wrought-iron ballustrades of Larchmere Manor. And she was a lady–une grande dame, bien sur–only in the ironical sense of the word. Une grande dame de la nuit, in point of fact.

Lady Brackenstall was–even lady Brackenstall would admit–now well beyond her prime, having been the proprietress of Larchmere Manor for over 25 years. Even presuming she had been a precocious young entrepreneur (and she had been), flinging open the heavy double doors of her establishment at the tender age of 20 or even 18 (and she had), the madame was still firmly settled in middle age.

But settled there with dignity. That was important. Many women her age, Lady Brackenstall had observed, grieved their youth like untimely widows, feeling abandoned and betrayed by each crease and fold, each wiry gray hair springing up where once only golden or chestnut waves had once flowed. Those ladies were preyed upon in their desperation by every door-to-door snake oil salesman and bent-backed midwife on the Eastern seaboard, soaking in vile tinctures, rubbing their skin with greasy liniments, wrapping it in stinking poultices, imbibing foul-smelling tonics and teas made of thistle of this and nettle of that.

Lady Brackenstall, ever with an eye for a swindle, steered clear of such nastiness. Without a husband to keep, already shunned by the social circles who might otherwise judge her, and uniformly feared by all who mattered, Lady Brackenstall embraced age as one relishing a due reward. She donned silk kimonos, brewed herself expensive little cups of Portuguese coffee, and had tropical flowers and sweet-smelling sachets placed all around her boudoir. She took breakfast in bed, never before 11:00, and commanded respect from all the young beautiful things in her employ.

“As she knelt by her, feeling with her palm the wet, burning forehead, she prayed a thousand times.” Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, p. 85.

* * *

As she knelt by her, feeling with her palm the wet, burning forehead, she prayed a thousand times. At first she prayed for the old woman to get better, to wake groggy and confused, demanding green tea with lemon and the Sunday crossword puzzle.

Over time, her prayers became more discrete. An hour of sleep without the wracking pains that sent the woman’s knobby fingers, with their strangely beautiful shaped nails, clutching the railing of the hospital bed. An hour without the pitiful moans and whimpers, the subterranean growl of failing organs. An hour without the indignity of being rolled this way and that so that others, strangers with strong, capable hands, could inspect, wipe, apply cream, as if to an infant.

In the final days, Mother Morphine presiding, Kaylin’s prayers branched in other directions. That the hospice literature was correct, that death in this manner–essentially by dehydration–was painless. That the very ill felt no hunger, in the end. That it was a kindness to let them sink into sleep, not to force them to take liquids or soft foods, which their bodies, already preparing, shrunk from like poison.

And finally, because the waiting was unendurable, because it was surely impossible for a person to survive four full days without a drop of water, because the reality of it made her question all reassurances, because what happens to the sinking flesh, hung on the bone structure of the face like clothes on hangers, is a slow and silent terror, for all of these reasons Kaylin wished in the end only for death. And one morning it came for the woman, simply, without fanfare, as it had for the others.

“So where do  they go?” Jack asked her later in the nurses’ lounge.

“Who?”

“The people you sit with. The old ladies. Heaven? Or do you think they’re … just gone?”

Kaylin looked up at him, but didn’t stop pushing the bits of lettuce around on her plate. She shrugged. “How would I know that?”

“No reason. Only, you’ve seen it more than most. The passing. The exit. Whatever you want to call it.”

She supposed that was true.

And … well, you’re different about it. Different from the others. You see Michelle get all bent out of shape each time. Carl jokes about it, but that’s a cover. But you, when you came in here just now your face was almost … serene. Like pictures of the saints in church.”

That made her giggle.

“Like you know something we don’t.”

Kaylin rolled her eyes and took a bite. “Well I don’t,” she said.

“Knowing. Believing. You must at least have an opinion?”

“No Jack, I really don’t.” But that wasn’t true. And she could tell he didn’t believe her.

“Somehow, I had the presence of mind to reach up and yank the ejection handle above my seat.” Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline, p. 338.

* * *

Somehow, I had the presence of mind to reach up and yank the ejection handle above my seat. It’s something you train for in drills. Accurately identifying the moment of no return. But nothing prepares you for what it feels like when you actually do it.

There was no simulator console blinking red, no soothing female voice congratulating me on making the most of an irretrievable situation or, more likely, explaining to me how I’d overreacted, needlessly abandoning a state-of-the-art flying machine to a fiery death, assigning me double simulation sessions to fine-tune my reflexes.

We all knew the training modules were programed to err on the side of saving the aircraft, not the rookie–or even the intermediate–pilot. Only when you’d logged hundreds of hours as a fleet runner did the balance begin to slowly shift, the zone in which the simulator recognized “eject and abandon craft” as a valid response to a catastrophic event begin to gradually expand.

But I don’t need a computer to tell me this much: if I hadn’t pulled that handle, I’d be dead right now; a smoldering hulk of charred wreckage at the bottom of this canyon.

I’ve had some time to think about it, sitting here in the escape pod, as it dangles from an impossibly thin strand of nylon, the last line connecting it to the parachute above me, caught in the only branch left on the only tree visible for miles around. At least, it used to be a tree. It’s now little more than a sand-blasted stump of bleached driftwood. It’s incredible, really, that that either the nylon thread or the tree’s branch has held the weight of my pod. That both have done so, for nearly two hours, as the wind turns the pod in slow concentric circles, out over the sheer cliff of the canyon and back again, is truly inexplicable.

As I think this, there is a sharp crack and the pod drops suddenly, just as it swings out over the void. My eyes squeeze shut, my heart leaps to my throat. But the thread holds.

That’s it, I tell myself. On the next in-swing I’m going to unbuckle my belt and slam myself as hard as I can against the floor of the pod. The thread is going to break eventually, and I’ll be damned if its going to do so while I’m dangling over 1000 meters of nothing and a rocky streambed.

“Children are very sensitive to injustice, you know.” The Edible Woman, by Margaret Atwood, p. 160.

* * *

“Children are very sensitive to injustice, you know.” The woman–Eugenia Fairfield, 67 years old, of 1137 Covent Lane–removed blue plastic gardening gloves with a faded print of red-hatted gnomes from her hands and smoothed her rumpled shorts. She wore the sort of woven straw sun visor peculiar to lady gardeners. It made a circular frame for the coils of glossy black hair shot through with silver that she’d piled up behind it. The officer’s eyes kept returning to that hair, marveling at the way the strands wove in and out of each other in loops and braids. It was like some intricate model of an atom or the solar system, with lines drawn in to show the orbits of even the smallest asteroids.

“And adults aren’t, would you say? Sensitive to injustice, I mean?” Officer Patterson asked absentmindedly as she filled out the lengthy incident report pinned to her clipboard. It was an art form, sustaining the bare minimum of conversation needed to keep a witness standing there, patiently waiting for all of the blanks to be filled and the applicable boxes checked. You wanted to keep them attentive, keep them talking, but stall any serious recitation of the facts until the appropriate moment, when you’d reached that portion of the form.

The officer had tried other methods, of course. At first she’d filled the various parts of the form out in any old order. But something always got missed that way. She tried scribbling notes in a flip notebook, like some sort of overeager novice reporter, then copying the information neatly into the form later, seated in the cramped squad car, between bites of marinara meatball sub. But inevitably at such times another call would come in. She’d wind up sitting at her desk long after her colleagues had left for the evening, baffled as to the meaning of some inscrutable notation from earlier in the day. No, this was the best way.

“I wouldn’t say they’re insensitive to it. Not all of them, at any rate. But a degree of complacency grows up, wouldn’t you say? You must observe that all the time, in your field …”

“Mmm. Hmm.” Officer Patterson wrote a bit faster, drawing firm diagonal lines through the portions of the form that didn’t seem to apply.

” … Take what happened here ….” She finally came to “Witness Account,” and following it, the tidy yet always insufficient block of seven horizontal lines.

“Yes. What did happen, Ms. Fairfield? In your own words.” She always added that. It was silly, but she had found it to be effective.”

“Well officer, I have to say, I’ve lived here 30 years and never seen anything like it.”