Half Moon Lake

by Kirsten Alexander

  She took a sip of water from the glass Anna Beth had left for her. As she stretched her legs, her toes touched the cotton-wrapped warming pan Mrs Penny must have recently slipped into the bed. The blankets were firm and smooth over her legs, tucked in after another sleepless night.

  When she wasn’t filling the tin bucket, Grace felt she’d crack a rib from coughing. She wheezed when she breathed, struggled to keep her eyes open for more than a few minutes. She’d already tried to get out of bed once that morning – had it been this morning? – but her body had failed her. She’d managed to sit on the edge of the bed, but when she attempted to stand, her legs shook and buckled. She’d lain back perspiring, then cold. Then asleep again.

  If it was after ten o’clock, the trial had begun. She knew that much. She wanted to be in the courthouse, but two days ago Gideon Wolf’s lawyer and assistant had come to the farm to speak to her about the trial. Mrs Penny had done her best to make Grace presentable, but Grace was sure she’d appeared like a bedraggled lunatic to them. She’d registered their expressions when, supported by Farmer Penny, she’d lowered herself into an armchair in the Penny living room.

  ‘You’ll be required in court on day two,’ the lawyer had said.

  ‘Not day one?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Day two,’ the assistant reiterated. He’d glanced at Mrs Penny. ‘Does she understand?’

  ‘Of course she understands,’ Mrs Penny tsked. The foreign man was a mite intimidating, but his underling was barely out of shorts. ‘She’s sick, not stupid.’

  The lawyer had listened intently while Grace explained what Esmeralda had told her.

  ‘We’d suspected some version of foul play, but not quite this.’ He’d seemed impressed by the ingenuity of the set-up, had spoken over the top of Grace’s feelings about it, ignored the Pennys. The lawyer repeated – more to his assistant than anyone else – that he had a great deal of experience in the courtroom, that they should stay with their strategy and keep knowledge of the truth up their sleeve, to be played only if it could work to their advantage. He said the part of Grace’s story that relied on information supplied by a Negro housekeeper wouldn’t take them where they wanted to go, was unprovable and inherently suspect. Grace’s task was to reaffirm that she’d willingly given her child over to Gideon Wolf.

  ‘Is that enough, though?’ she’d asked. ‘Shouldn’t the jury hear the Davenports are conspiring to –’

  ‘No. You are to be polite and demure, speak when spoken to and refrain from extended answers. You’re part of a larger argument, Miss Mill. Please trust we know our business.’

  While the lawyer talked Grace through the various ways in which Gomer Ellis would attempt to derail and undermine her, Mrs Penny asked her husband to join her in the kitchen.

  ‘I don’t think they’re interested in helping her get Ned back. They only want to get that tramp set free,’ she whispered. ‘I fear she’ll be lost in all this.’

  ‘But if the tramp’s story is proven right she gets her boy back, doesn’t she? Stands to reason.’

  ‘I suppose so, but I don’t like the way they’re talking to her. It seems wrong.’

  Farmer Penny agreed. ‘Does she need her own lawyer, do you think? How many are let in the room?’

  ‘As many as are needed, I imagine,’ Mrs Penny said, shrugging. ‘But the sheriff would’ve told us if she was supposed to have one.’

  ‘Well, we can help her if it comes to that.’

  Farmer Penny’s father had been one of the few men in Opelousas to buy into the Louisiana Lottery twenty-five years before. When the two boys from the Asylum for the Blind had picked his ticket from the barrel, Penny Senior had something to pass down to his son. Those winnings had spared the Pennys the horrors that befell other farmers when the weather turned on them, and had enabled Farmer Penny and his sons to add extra rooms: a second bedroom, then a third, a lean-to, a chicken coop. Even with last year’s remade barn, and gifts to both the Macdonald and Lamott families, whose crops had been decimated by boll weevils, there was money to help Grace.

  Grace was distraught by the time the Pennys re-entered the living room.

  ‘It’s merely a question of letting the Davenports save face,’ the lawyer said.

  ‘I don’t care about that,’ Grace replied.

  ‘But they do, so you must. You cannot think that accusing the most powerful man in Opelousas of childnapping and deceit will get you what you want, Miss Mill. That is not how the world works.’

  ‘But I’m yet to hear you explain how you’ll convince the jury they have my Ned.’

  ‘That seems a reasonable question,’ Mrs Penny said in the gaps between Grace’s fresh coughing fit.

  ‘More a statement than a –’ The lawyer’s assistant stopped when he saw Mrs Penny’s stern expression. How, he thought, did every woman of advanced age know that same look of admonition employed by his mother?

  The lawyer reclaimed control of the conversation. His assistant lacked the deft touch required with anxious women. ‘I’ve won many cases in my time, Miss Mill. That’s why I’m here. Your job is to get yourself into the courthouse on time and do as I’ve said. Let me manage the rest.’

  After the lawyers had left, Anna Beth helped Mrs Penny take Grace back to bed. Anna Beth returned with Mr Miggs and placed him on the bedspread near Grace’s feet.

  ‘You’ve no intention of keeping to his script, have you?’ Anna Beth asked.

  ‘None at all.’

  Grace was sure the judge would want to learn he’d been hoodwinked along with her. Once she explained what Esmeralda had said, the judge would surely dismiss the case and Ned would be returned to her. The truth would win out.

  She lay in bed with the sheet held to her face to soften the smell of vomit. She felt it too much of a liberty to ask one of the Pennys to empty the bucket again. They’d attend to her when they could, as they had for weeks. Grace promised herself she’d find a way to repay them.

  But first, she needed to reclaim Ned. He’d be awake now, as his fate was decided by the trial-in-progress. Had he been outside somewhere or in the house, upstairs, when she’d been shown – who had she been shown? She replayed that day over in her mind, wishing she’d run from the room, shouting Ned’s name.

  With a stab, the thought occurred to her that the Davenport woman would’ve tried to win Ned over. What if she’d succeeded, and he didn’t want to come back to Grace? She yanked back the tight blankets and turned to hold her head above the bucket once more.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Gomer Ellis didn’t surprise anyone with his opening statement. The Davenport story had been written about endlessly, so though he summarised it with gusto, people in the courtroom used the time to continue preening and looking around for familiar faces. Tom, who did listen since he needed quotes, recognised some of his own sentences in Ellis’s speech. ‘Stalwarts of our community, a respected family that’s contributed enormously to our town.’ That was his. Not even his best work.

  But Opelousans sat up straight for Wolf’s lawyer. They’d seen Gabino on the streets, agreed among themselves that he was polite and dapper. He began his statement confident, poised, restrained. He felt sad for the Davenports. ‘Only savages would be unmoved by a fine family having gone through such an ordeal. We are not savages.’ His lolloping, accented English made his sentences sound like a haughty song. People couldn’t tell from his appearance alone – his broad jaw, equine nose – if he was usual or exceptional for someone from his country. He came from an influential family, was a man of good breeding, though he lived in San Francisco, which was troubling. (‘Mexicans, heathens, unionists and bears. How a lawyer of merit could come from somewhere so lawless is beyond me,’ Mrs Billingham had said. Gladys had shrugged away her mother’s criticisms. Merit was such a subjective notion.)

  Gabino was dismissive of the idea that Ellis would be able to argue anything worth the jury’s time of day. ‘You see, the Davenports’ loss, however poignant, has nothin
g to do with my client. Nothing.’ But the men of the jury seemed no more moved by his eloquence than by Ellis’s pragmatic delivery.

  Barber Smith noted the elegant cut of Gabino’s suit. Ben Fleury hoped he’d fully turned off his leaky bathtub faucet that morning. And Martin LeMaire recalled an Italian customer he’d once had in his bakery; the man had acted suspiciously, had been more than a little arrogant.

  Gabino could tell he didn’t have the jurors’ full engagement, so he injected a touch of outrage into his speech: ‘Desperate for someone to blame, someone to be responsible for their years of pain, Mrs Davenport’s descent into madness and –’

  ‘Objection,’ Ellis said.

  The judge agreed. ‘I see no grounds for you to discuss Mrs Davenport’s state of mind.’

  Mary scowled at this half-defence: no grounds to discuss and, they had not added, no evidence of any such state.

  Sitting a row away from the jury box, Sheriff Sherman wondered where Gabino was getting his information from. The Davenports might have a genuine fight on their hands. He glanced towards the back of the room. Where was Grace Mill?

  Gabino walked towards the jury. ‘Let me be frank with you, gentlemen. I think that’s what we all want. In order for the Davenports to win, which is to send this man, Gideon Wolf, to a lifetime of penury or death, that man and woman’ – here he pointed to where the Davenports sat – ‘need you to believe they’ve captured the villain who stole their son. Now, that would provide the closure you’ve wanted after following the story for years. I understand. But their case is built on thin air. And you need more than that to convict an innocent man. So,’ he said, tapping the polished balustrade separating him from the jury, ‘I hope you will allow me to explain, methodically and comprehensively, that my client has committed no crime, certainly no crime that involves this family. In fact, if the Davenports were inclined to civility, and we’ll get them there’ – here he winked – ‘they’d admit they owe my client a debt of gratitude. For Mr Wolf did indeed meet their son, fed him, returned him –’

  Upstairs, Esmeralda whispered to Joe. ‘Why is he saying the boy with Gideon Wolf was Sonny? Pennys didn’t talk to him?’

  Joe shrugged. ‘Maybe saving them for a big finish.’

  ‘He can’t argue the boy is Sonny and Ned.’

  Gladys was about to say to her mother that she was finding Gabino’s reasoning quite compelling when Ellis stood up.

  ‘Objection, your Honour. Gideon Wolf did not return the boy. He was apprehended by Sheriff Bird in the company of the boy, at a time when Sonny Davenport’s kidnapping was public knowledge. Had –’

  The judge waved at Ellis to sit. ‘Counsel will stick to the facts. Jury members, please note Mr Wolf did not return Sonny Davenport. Were that true, none of us would be here today.’

  Gabino smirked. ‘Semantics aside, the fact is that Gideon Wolf, a luckless tramp without a mean bone in his body, came upon a lost child and helped him, because he is a man of good conscience. What’s more, when you hear the remarkable specifics of his generosity, you’ll be convinced beyond doubt that Mr Wolf should be set free.’ He slapped the balustrade. ‘Applauded.’

  Esmeralda narrowed her eyes. How did this story include Grace Mill and Ned?

  The jury stared at Gabino eagerly but, confident he now had them in his pocket, the lawyer walked back to the table and set about arranging his papers.

  Majestic, Gladys thought. She wasn’t often taken with foreigners, but this one gave her goosebumps.

  Gomer Ellis stood once more. ‘Gentlemen of the jury, I know every one of you. And you’re far too smart to be taken in by amateur dramatics. There are no “remarkable specifics”, no cloak-and-dagger reveal. The only unexpected part of this trial is what you may have learned from the newspapers – that the tramp has a rich brother who’s willing to send his fancy lawyer to our town to keep a guilty man out of jail. But where is the justice in that? We know the truth.’ He paused for a breath, anticipating Gabino’s objection, but it didn’t come. Interesting. ‘John Henry and Mary Davenport’s boy was kidnapped by Gideon Wolf. Sonny was playing with his brothers when he was snatched onto the train by this vagrant, and sped away to another state. The Davenports did what any loving parents would do – more, in fact. They searched for their child for years, across hundreds of miles, never giving up, suffering hardships most of us won’t experience in our lifetime. And their efforts paid off when Sheriff Bird found Sonny in the clutches of that man.’ He pointed at Wolf. ‘That man who sits with his brother’s out-of-town lawyer, telling you he did nothing wrong. Nothing wrong? How can it be right to roam the streets with a young boy stolen from his parents?’ Ellis appeared incredulous. ‘It isn’t. It simply isn’t.’

  Gabino stood up. ‘Is the prosecution calling a witness, or have I misunderstood court procedure?’

  The jury members laughed.

  Eddie turned to Nora. ‘Cocky as all get-out, this guy.’

  ‘I was, indeed, building to that.’ Gomer Ellis cleared his throat. ‘We call John Henry Davenport.’

  Gomer Ellis guided John Henry through a serviceable statement. But Gabino, having identified his strengths with this jury, played up both his exoticism and the lure of his ‘remarkable specifics’ to keep them interested. ‘So no one saw the train at Half Moon Lake, in fact. Or saw Gideon Wolf on this imagined train,’ he said to John Henry. ‘Curious that something so large and loud could pass through unnoticed. And your older boys gave no explanation for why the youngest ran off alone? One does question why he ran.’ He raised his eyebrows at Ben Fleury, shared a moment’s surprise with Barber Smith Senior.

  John Henry didn’t find the lawyer either novel or intimidating, and Gabino saw this. He knew they recognised themselves enough in one another – their fine cloth, their assured carriage, their easy politeness; the courtroom and Gabino’s personal lineage affording the lawyer enough status to become John Henry’s equivalent – that the interaction could have been almost fraternal. Although they were on opposing sides, it was clear they started from a place of mutual understanding. But they both hungered to win, and were equally versed in the lunge and parry of argument.

  None of Gabino’s questions – no matter how blunt or provocative – ruffled John Henry. He matched the lawyer in volume, vocabulary and tone, and seemed prepared for every line of inquiry and veiled insult even though Gabino’s repetitions were designed to catch him out. He even knew to speak from his heart, in an almost womanly way, to appeal to the jury’s sentimentality. ‘To bring an end to my wife’s pain, to embrace my son after years without him – I know that every man here would feel the same relief I felt when I found our boy,’ he said.

  Gabino gave John Henry a nod of respect. But he hadn’t travelled to this two-horse town to lose.

  ‘Is it conceivable that your desire to relieve your wife of her misery might have caused you to accuse my client of a crime without comprehending his true nature or the full complexity of his actions?’

  ‘No. I am, I believe, a good judge of character. Also, I understand the solid nature of fact. My son was found with Mr Wolf, and Mr Wolf is his captor.’

  ‘Unless,’ Gabino said, ‘he is his saviour.’

  Ellis, at his table, swore under his breath.

  Upstairs, Esmeralda and Joe whispered to one another, confused as to why Gabino hadn’t asked John Henry about the viewing in his home.

  ‘Cat-and-mouse game is keeping people interested,’ Esmeralda said. ‘But what’s stopping him from mentioning Grace? They’re acting as though she doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Only thing I can think of is that he’s trying to lay some hay so Mr Davenport can have an easy landing. He’s more likely to admit a wrongdoing if he can walk away with his head held up,’ Joe said. ‘Rich people give each other outs.’

  ‘I don’t know. I think something else is brewing.’

  Ellis called Mary’s doctor to the stand to confirm he had caused the mark on the boy’s arm while using forceps
during delivery. Ellis had decided to plough on with his strategy, no matter what Gabino was doing. He could only assume that Gabino was going to introduce Grace Mill to his storyline soon to pull the rug out from under John Henry and Mary. Grace must be his ‘remarkable specifics’. Ellis needed to eradicate in advance any thoughts that the boy was not Sonny Davenport.

  ‘I was compelled,’ the doctor explained, ‘to use some amount of force to pull the baby from the birth canal before his life became compromised. It was quite … physical.’ He stopped to see if Ellis wanted him to explain more fully, but the lawyer’s expression of distaste made it clear he’d heard enough. ‘Of course, I’d sedated Mrs Davenport so she was unaffected by the procedure. The forceps, while necessary, did make a curved mark on the baby’s left arm, a permanent mark.’

  The doctor also confirmed he’d examined the child living in the Davenport home, and he was the same child he’d delivered. The boy’s muteness was a mystery, ‘though most likely due to shock’.

  Ellis addressed the jury. ‘Sirs, you may hear argument from the defence that the boy found with Gideon Wolf was not the Davenports’ son. I know you will have heard many versions of this nonsense in your day-to-day life. I trust the doctor has now put that to rest. The defence has spread this theory to provide a reason Gideon Wolf should be released. Do not be fooled.’

  Mary Davenport was escorted to the stand, and guided by Ellis through her statement with gentleness and deference. No one was interested in the facts she agreed to. Mary’s job, as Gomer Ellis and John Henry had explained to her, was to help the jury see how much her sons meant to her, how loving a mother she was, how devoted a wife, how courageous, dignified and reasonable she was. As unnecessary as it should be, she was demonstrating her superior nature. This would hold her in good stead when she would be, unavoidably, insultingly, compared with the unwed farm girl later on.