been murdered while going about his lawful business, they might think again.
“Well, the good news is,” the lawyer said, as he climbed back into his car, “state of Kentucky hasn’t executed a woman since 1868. Let alone a pregnant one.” This fact didn’t seem to make Sven feel much better.
“What are we going to do now?” he said, as he and Alice walked back from the jailhouse.
“We keep going,” said Alice. “We keep everything going as normal and wait for somebody to see sense.”
* * *
• • •
But six weeks passed, and nobody did see sense. Margery remained in the jailhouse even as various other miscreants came and went (and were, in some cases, returned). Attempts to transfer her to a women’s prison were rebuffed, and in truth Alice felt that if Margery had to stay locked up it was probably better for her to be where they could stop by and see her than to be somewhere in the city where nobody would know her and where she would be surrounded by the noise and fumes of a world completely alien to her.
So Alice rode to the jailhouse every day with a tin of still-warm cornbread (she had pulled the recipe from one of the library books and could now bake it without even looking) or pie or whatever else she had to hand, and had become something of a favorite with the guards. Now nobody ever mentioned slips but merely handed back the previous day’s napkin and motioned her through with barely a word. With Sven, they were a little stickier, because his size tended to make other men nervous. Along with food she would bring a change of undergarments, woolen sweaters, if needed, and a book, although the jail was so dark in the basement that there were only a few hours a day in which Margery could see to read. And nearly every evening when Alice finished up at the library she would head home to the cabin in the woods, sit at the table with Sven, and they would tell each other that this thing would be sorted out eventually, no doubt, and Margery would resemble herself once she was out in the fresh air again, and neither of them would believe a word the other was saying, until he left, and she would go to bed to lie awake staring at the ceiling until dawn.
* * *
• • •
That year, it was as if they had missed spring completely. One minute it was frozen, and then it was as if the rains had washed away a whole couple of months because Lee County slammed abruptly into a full-on heatwave. The monarch butterflies returned, the weeds rose on the verges, waist high under blossoming dogwoods, and Alice borrowed one of Margery’s wide-brimmed leather hats and wore a handkerchief around her neck to stop herself burning, and slapped at the biting creatures on her horse’s neck with the buckle of her reins.
Alice and Fred spent as much time together as they could, but they didn’t talk too much about Margery. Once they had done their best to meet her practical needs, nobody knew what to say.
The coroner’s inquest had found that Clem McCullough had died from a catastrophic injury to the back of his skull, probably caused by a blow to the back of his head or by falling onto a rock. Unfortunately the decomposition of the body did not allow for a more accurate conclusion. Margery had been due to testify at the coroner’s court, but an angry crowd had built up outside it and, given her condition, it was decreed that it would not be wise for her to enter.
The closer she drew to her due date, the more frustrated Sven had become, railing at the jailhouse deputy until he had been barred from visiting for a week—it would have been longer, but Sven was liked in town, and everyone knew nerves were getting to him. Margery had grown milk-pale, and her hair hung down in a dirty plait; she ate the food Alice proffered with a kind of detached observance, as if she would really rather not but she understood that she was obliged to do so. There was not a time that Alice visited her when it didn’t seem that having Margery stuck in a cell was a crime against nature: a flat-out reversal of how everything should be. Everything felt wrong while she was locked away, the mountains empty, the library