The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Shade nodded. He never thought that Danny would die in a plane crash. That finale would have been too neat and too romantic, leaving Rose with a beautiful memory and little lasting harm. Shade was afraid that Danny would go on for years in his charming, feckless way, entangling himself in financial binds and legal scrapes from which Rose would be forced to save him, and, through it all, she would stick with him, growing older and plainer as the years passed, until all chances of a happy family were lost to her. And then he would dump her. Shade closed his eyes to keep from seeing her tears. It was almost enough to make you wish for another Great War. You couldn’t beat a war for getting rid of reckless jackleg pilots.

  Henry stirred out of his reverie and straightened his tie. “I have had enough of this place. I want to go home.”

  Rose shrugged. “It wasn’t very interesting here, anyway. No outlandish yokels in overalls or women in pioneer dresses riding in buckboards. We might as well have been in New Jersey.”

  “Maybe you should say that in the story, Rose.”

  “It’s not what America wants to hear. They want this place to be a storybook kingdom peopled with . . .” She made a face and mimicked, “. . . our frontier ancestors. We aim to please. So, look, there’s a train station in the next town over, Shade. You could take us there in the morning, and we could write the stories when we got back.”

  “I suppose you want me to cover for you in court.”

  “Please, Shade. It’s a matter of life and death for me. It’s Danny. In trouble. And look at Henry. You can see he’s in no shape to remain here. There was a fire in his room, Shade!”

  Shade wondered if Rose knew why Henry was terrified of flames. He wouldn’t put it past her to ask him. Not that it mattered. But she was right. Henry was a wreck. But that didn’t change the fact that there was a job to be done. “You’ve hardly interviewed anybody. You haven’t even talked to the lawyers, have you?”

  Rose waved away his objections. “It’s a bunch of hicks, Shade! Who cares? At the Lindbergh trial we played it by the book, didn’t we? But these people don’t matter. We’ll just make it up when we get back. You stay here and call us when the verdict comes in. You’re going to need an after-verdict photo for the front page, anyhow, so you have to stay.”

  Henry struggled to his feet. “I must go and see the accused before we go.”

  They gaped at him. “But your dinner . . .” said Shade. “Maybe you should rest a bit more.”

  Rose glanced at her wristwatch. “And at this hour? Henry, they’d never let you inside the jail.”

  He drew himself up to his full height. “Of course they will. I am Henry Jernigan. And Shade is right. We have barely scratched the surface of this story. At least I want to see the prisoner face-to-face, to see what I think of her.” Before they could muster further arguments to dissuade him, Henry laid his napkin across his empty plate and strode away.

  IN THE HALLWAY of the courthouse, Carl was pacing. Nora had been downstairs in the jail for nine minutes now, which he took as a good sign. She must have been allowed to see the prisoner, or else she’d have been back by now. He hoped that Erma Morton had said something that he could use, or, failing that, maybe Nora would get some sense of what had really happened to Pollock Morton that night in Pound. The Bonesteels knew things. They couldn’t prove those things, and would not have bothered to try, but like as not they saw to the heart of the matter.

  The click of footsteps on the marble floor made him turn. Henry Jernigan, looking pale and ill, was heading in his direction, obviously making for the door that led to the jailhouse stairs. Carl hurried forward. “Are you all right, Mr. Jernigan? Would you like to sit down?”

  Henry blinked at him, and passed a shaking hand over his forehead. “Do I know you?”

  Carl hesitated. “We have met, sir. But that doesn’t matter. It’s just that you look unwell.”

  Henry was not looking at him. His gazed seemed to be fixed somewhere in the distance, and he kept licking his lips, as if some question had been posed to him and he did not know the answer. “I have had a shock,” he said at last. “It is nothing germane to the matter at hand. A jolt to my system—personal, but of no consequence. Nevertheless, I must attend to my duties as a journalist. I have come to interview the prisoner.”

  Carl realized that Henry Jernigan had mistaken him for an officer of the court, an attorney, perhaps. It crossed his mind to repay him for the slight back in Abingdon when he had mistaken Carl for a hotel porter. It would be easy now to take advantage of his mistake by telling him that the prisoner was unavailable, and Carl might have done it if Henry Jernigan had not looked so disoriented and ill. As it was, he decided that the great man had enough to worry about without any pettiness on his part.

  “Just over there to the right, sir. There’s a door that leads down to the jail. Do you need any help? The stairs are steep.”

  Before Henry could answer, the door opened and Nora came out, looking, much to Carl’s relief, as solemn and composed as ever. She spotted him and started to smile, but then she looked over at Henry Jernigan and froze.

  Carl saw her take an involuntary step back, as if she wanted to rush back down the stairs, and he wondered what she was seeing that made the confines of a jail seem preferable to her. After a moment, though, she composed herself. Then she gave him a look and a little tilt of the head that meant, “Make yourself scarce.” Carl nodded and hurried away, pretending that he had just remembered some important errand. He would wait for her just inside the big glass front doors.

  WHEN CARL HAD TURNED the corner of the hallway, Nora Bonesteel took a deep breath and approached Henry Jernigan, who was looking at her with a puzzled expression, as if he were trying to place her.

  “You don’t know me,” said Nora. “But you look as if you’ve had a shock.”

  Henry wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Thank you, young lady,” he said gravely. “I am on the mend.”

  “Yes, sir. But if you’ll pardon my asking, does your trouble have to do with a little girl from the Orient? She has glasses and a red-flowered robe.”

  Henry took a step backward, and staggered. “Were there no witch trials ever in these hills?”

  Nora blushed. “I don’t hex folk, sir. I can’t help but see things.”

  “I wish I could see her. At least . . . how does she look? Is it . . . terrible?”

  Nora reached for Henry’s hand. After a moment she said, “She’s all right. By the time the flames got to her, she had already died from the—I don’t know what you call it. Bad air?”

  Henry nodded. “Asphyxiation? The fire was—I had heard that it burned away the air. I hope it was peaceful for her.”

  “It’s over for her, anyhow.” Nora was looking not at him, but a little to his right. Gently, she smiled.

  “I must believe you,” said Henry. “You could not know. I never speak of it. Even Rose . . . Well, why then? Why, after all these years, is Ishi with me—here on the other side of the world?”

  “Because . . . it is not over for you.”

  THE JURY WAS FILING BACK into the courtroom, carefully keeping their faces devoid of expression as juries always do. Shade Baker had secured a seat in the second row, as close to the defendant’s table as he could get. When the verdict was read, he would need a photo of Erma Morton’s reaction. So far he had abided by the court rules barring photos, but today was all-important, so he had slipped five bucks to the bailiff, who promised to act surprised and eject him from the courtroom only after he had got his shots.

  If he himself were on trial, Shade resolved that he would accept the verdict without a flicker of emotion, in order to deprive the vultures of the satisfaction of seeing his pain. But professionally, of course, he had to hope for more visual drama: a horrified scream as the defendant fought off the approaching officers, or floods of tears as she collapsed on her lawyer’s shoulder. A dead faint, while crowds circled her, shouting.

  He was trying to watch everyone at onc
e: the stern old judge; the two fidgeting attorneys, trying to conceal their eagerness for the verdict; the defendant, who already seemed stupefied by the immensity of the decision she would soon hear; and the jurors, standing there like so many wooden Indians, relieved to be done with the onerous task of deciding the fate of a young girl with so few facts on which to base that decision.

  He had promised to report all this by phone to Rose and Henry, who might have made it back by now, and he tried to anticipate the questions they would ask about the scene. Rose would have to be told in detail what Erma Morton was wearing. He would have to ask somebody; he was no hand at telling one fabric from another, or naming colors by degree. Shade supposed that Henry would want him to have a word with one of the jurors, to see how they arrived at the verdict. He had been worried about having to report on the outcome.

  As they had braced from the wind on the platform of the train depot, Shade made one last-ditch attempt to prevent them from going. “But don’t you want to see how the case ends?”

  “How it ends?” Red-cheeked with cold, Rose peered at him over her fur collar. “Shade, what does it matter? She’s a beautiful girl.”

  “But they still might find her guilty.”

  “Yes, but so what? Like I said, she’s beautiful. So there will always be pie-eyed saps who are willing to make a crusade on her behalf. If she goes to prison, they’ll make a cause of her. They’ll write letters to all the newspapers, badger the governor, the attorney general—heck, the Pope, if they think of it—until they get her out, whether she did it or not. There are always people willing to rescue pretty faces.”

  Shade stared at her, but there was not a trace of irony in her face or voice. She was thinking about pretty little Erma Morton in a jail cell, not about a shady pilot with the face of a stained glass saint. He forced himself to smile. “Let me know how it goes with Danny,” he said, as she hugged him good-bye.

  Henry had seemed almost like his old self, no doubt relieved to be on his way home. “I should stick this out,” he murmured.

  “I don’t mind,” said Shade. “Go home and get some rest.”

  “I would have stayed if it would have made any difference. If I could have saved her, of course I would have stayed.”

  And then they were gone. On the drive back to Wise, Shade wondered what Henry had meant by those parting words, which, he was pretty sure, did not refer to Erma Morton.

  HE TURNED HIS ATTENTION BACK to the jurors, still standing in the box, careful to look at no one. The judge had examined the slip of paper delivered to him by the bailiff, and now he asked the foreman to pronounce the verdict. The courtroom was quieter than it had been for the entire trial. You could hear the intake of breath.

  Guilty.

  There was one frozen moment in which nobody moved. Then the courtroom erupted in a babel of voices, and above the din, the gravel voice of the old judge thanked the jurors for their service and dismissed them.

  Shade reached to the floor and hoisted the wieldy camera and flash gun, shoving his way past the spectators in the aisles, so that he would have a clear shot of the defense table.

  Erma Morton, who had stood with her attorney while the verdict was pronounced, sank back into her chair with her hand clutched at her throat. She stared straight ahead, ashen and silent, while her attorney was bending over and whispering urgently in her ear. She seemed oblivious to him, or to the roaring crowd behind her.

  Shade managed to get off two shots before a bailiff grabbed his arm and hustled him out of the courtroom. Shade walked hunched over, protecting the camera and its precious cargo with his body. Once the crowd had thinned a bit, he broke free of the bailiff and ran up the aisle, hoping to get more photos in the hallway. He positioned himself against the wall, facing the door he had just come through.

  The exiting spectators seemed calm for people who had just watched a young woman lose her future. Shade kept still and tried to catch snatches of conversation as they passed.

  Harley Morton elbowed his way through the throng, shepherding his mother out of the courtroom. Mrs. Morton was dry-eyed and composed, and Harley’s expression was somewhere between triumphant and belligerent. They stopped briefly in front of Shade’s camera.

  “We’re fighting this,” said Harley, striking a pose. “I’m booking lectures to raise money for the appeal. When I get to New York, come see the show.”

  Shade nodded. His editor would make him go anyway.

  “Serves her right,” said a spare older man to his portly companion. “Trying to get away with murder by turning the world against the rest of us.”

  “Did you notice how calm she was when the foreman pronounced her guilty? Never turned a hair. I wouldn’t put anything past her—”

  “It’s her sister I feel sorry for,” said a woman clinging to the arm of her husband. “Such a scandal in the family. Not that he’ll be missed by any of them.”

  “Now maybe they’ll stop printing lies about us in the newspapers.”

  Shade took a shot of the crowd in the doorway. Where were the jurors? He took a step toward the door to see who was still inside the courtroom when someone tapped his arm. Shade turned. It was the skinny young man in the cheap overcoat who had been at the trial every day. He wasn’t a lawyer, a juror, or a witness.

  “Yeah?” said Shade.

  “You’re with the New York reporters, aren’t you?”

  “So?”

  “I don’t see them here.”

  “No.”

  “But you’re the photographer?” When Shade nodded, he stumbled on. “I’m covering the story for a little paper in Tennessee, and it’s my first big assignment, so I wondered if I could persuade you to sell me one of those photographs you took of Erma Morton. It sure would help my standing with my boss.”

  With an expressionless stare, Shade Baker looked him up and down for a moment. Then he turned away. “Can’t help you there, buddy.”

  “Please . . . I’m afraid they’re going to fire me.”

  Shade turned back and sighed. “Kid,” he said, “it’ll be the biggest favor they could do you. Your ticket outta there.”

  “WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO, Carl?” Nora Bonesteel stood shivering on the platform of the Norton depot.

  He had not spoken a word for nearly ten minutes, not since Cousin Araby had driven away and left them there at the station. He kept staring up the tracks as if willing the train to show up, but it didn’t. Nora knew he wanted to be left alone. His eyes were red and he had hardly touched the breakfast Cousin Araby had fixed for them. She ought not to try to talk to him, but she was cold and worried, and she wanted him to tell her it wasn’t the end of the world, even if it was.

  So she asked again.

  He looked at her with a watery smile. “Can’t you tell me? Can’t you use that Bonesteel gift and look into the future and tell me if I’m gonna be all right?”

  “I mean what are you fixing to do?”

  Carl stuck his hands in his pockets and began to pace the platform. “I got fired, Nora. I’m sorry I can’t take this with a shrug and a smile like a movie cowboy. Jobs are hard to come by these days, and I set a store by this one. This one was my ticket out.”

  She nodded, close to tears herself. “But it wasn’t your fault. You told the truth, and you thought she was guilty. And the jury agreed with you.”

  He kept his eyes fixed on the empty stretch of track. “My editor said my stories were so different from the national coverage that he was beginning to wonder if I was even there. And he said that my reporting was dull. Just a string of facts. Not like all those flowery pieces the big-city reporters were churning out.”

  “You told the truth, though.”

  “Apparently it’s not a marketable commodity.”

  Nora thought about it. “You finished college, though. Maybe you could be a lawyer.”

  “Now there’s an outlet for truth.” He laughed. “No, I reckon I won’t give up, little cousin. That photographer fellow from New York
said that maybe getting let go could be a blessing in disguise, and maybe it is. Maybe it’s a sign that I need to get out of these hills and make my way out in the world. It would have been easier if I’d made a name for myself with this trial, but it can still be done.”

  Nora nodded, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “You always wanted to see the world.”

  He smiled and patted her shoulder. “I didn’t figure on getting booted out into it quite so soon. But I guess I’m ready. Maybe it was a sign. Our family believes in signs, don’t they, Nora?”

  She smiled up at him through her tears. “We believe in you, anyhow.”

  One day soon he would be gone, and she would never see him again. But there was no point in talking about it. Knowing is one thing. Changing is another.

  ERMA

  So it is over, and all is lost.

  Guilty.

  In my cell I have a whole collection of newspapers full of stories about me, and my family, and the murder trial, and Wise County in general. I don’t know why I keep them. No one would want to make a scrapbook of such an ordeal as this. I would like nothing better than to forget it entirely. People say that the newspapers have made me famous, but that will be over soon enough. Besides, sometimes I think I could put that stack of papers through a sieve and not find a single grain of truth.

  The ones who think I am innocent describe me as slender and beautiful, while the papers closer to home, who have their doubts, say I am gaunt and well-groomed. It is a little game they are playing with the thesaurus, I reckon, because as far as I can tell, they are saying the same thing, just changing the feelings.

  The big-city reporters came up with an outlandish notion they called “the Code of the Hills,” which they write about in their news stories, trying to explain why the people of Wise County are out to get me. They seem to think that if I am beautiful and innocent, then everyone ought to love me, and if they don’t, why, there’s something wrong with them. I suppose they got the notion of a Code of the Hills out of a book, maybe Mr. Fox’s from 1908, although if it is in there, then he made it up, because there is no such thing.