her! Oh, and, Mr. Judge? My sister has a message for you too.”
“That would be Phyllis Stone, older sister of the witness. She is apparently bedridden and could not make it down the mountain,” murmured the clerk to the judge.
Judge Arthurs leaned back. There may have been a faint roll of his eyes.
“Go ahead, Mrs. Stone.”
“She wanted me to tell you . . . ‘Y’all can go to Hell, because who’s going to bring us our Mack Maguire books now?’” she said loudly. Then she nodded. “Yup, y’all can go to Hell. That was it.”
And as the judge began to bang his gavel again, Beth and Kathleen, on each side of Alice, couldn’t help but let out a small burst of laughter.
* * *
• • •
Despite that moment of cheer, the librarians left the building that evening in muted mood, their faces drawn, as if the verdict could only be a formality. Alice and Fred walked together at the rear, their elbows bumping occasionally, both deep in thought.
“It might improve once Mr. Turner gets his say,” said Fred, as they reached the library building.
“Perhaps.”
He stopped as the others went inside. “Would you like something to eat before you head off?”
Alice glanced behind her at the people still spilling out of the upper level of the courthouse and felt suddenly mutinous. Why shouldn’t she eat where she wanted? How much of a sin could it be, given everything else that was going on? “That would be lovely, Fred. Thank you.”
She walked up to Fred’s house alongside him, her back straight, daring anybody to comment, and they moved around each other in the kitchen, preparing a meal, in some strange facsimile of domesticity, one that neither of them felt able to remark upon.
They didn’t talk of Margery, or Sven, or the baby, even though those three souls were lodged almost permanently in their thoughts. They didn’t talk of how Alice had divested herself of almost all the belongings she had acquired since arriving in Kentucky, and that just one small trunk now sat in Margery’s cabin, neatly labeled and awaiting her passage home. They remarked on the good taste of the food, the surprising harvest of apples that year, the erratic behavior of one of his new horses and a book Fred had read called Of Mice and Men, which he wished he hadn’t, despite the quality of the writing, as it was too darn depressing just now. And two hours later, Alice set off for the cabin and, while she smiled at Fred as she left (because it was almost impossible for her not to smile at Fred), within minutes of her departure she found that, behind her benign exterior, she was filled with a now semi-permanent rage: at a world where she could sit alongside the man she loved for only a matter of days more, and at a small town where three lives were about to be ruined for ever because of a crime a woman had not committed.
* * *
• • •
The week slid forward in fury-inducing fits and starts. Every day the librarians took their seats at the front of the public gallery, and every day they listened to various expert witnesses expounding and dissecting the facts of the case—that the blood on the edition of Little Women matched that of Clem McCullough, that the bruising to the front of his face and forehead was consistent with a blow from the same. As the week drew on, the court heard from the so-called character witnesses: the purse-mouthed wife who announced that Margery O’Hare had pressed upon her a book she and her husband could only describe as “obscene.” The fact that Margery had just had a baby out of wedlock, and with no visible shame whatsoever. There were the various older men—Henry Porteous for one—who felt able to testify to the length of the O’Hares’ feud with the McCulloughs, and the capacity for meanness and vengeance in both families. The defense counsel tried to pick apart these testimonies in the interests of balance: “Sheriff, isn’t it true that Miss O’Hare has never been arrested once in her thirty-eight years for any crime whatsoever?”
“It is,” the sheriff conceded. “Mind you, plenty of moonshiners around here ain’t never seen the inside of a cell either.”
“Objection!”
“I’m just saying, Your Honor. Just because a person ain’t been arrested don’t mean they behave like an angel. You know how things work around these parts.”
The judge ordered the statement expunged from the record.