Wednesday morning it was clear that Teddy was in pain. He was moving carefully, taking shallow breaths. Seth guessed that he had a broken rib. Snowboarders broke ribs. Most were fractures that got better on their own, but they could hurt like hell while they were doing it.
Thursday morning he was coughing and running a fever, and Norma told the deputies that he had to go to the ER immediately. He probably had pneumonia.
The judge delayed testimony on Thursday, clearly hoping that Teddy would return, but after lunch the jurors filed into the courtroom, and another witness was called.
They were down to twelve.
The judge had to do something. The trial wasn’t progressing any more quickly, and the jury wasn’t doing well. People were growing stiff from the worn mattresses and the hours of sitting. Marcus and Caitlin were losing weight while others were gaining. No one seemed interested in watching movies or playing games. The women who had been trying to learn to knit or crochet stopped. April’s laugh seemed louder. Seth couldn’t tell if it actually was louder or if the rest of them had gotten more quiet.
Thursday afternoon they were told that they all had single rooms. But Seth was the only one who bothered to move. The rest were too weary to care. At dinner the deputies had printed up the box scores as well as newspaper articles about major national events, something that could have been done a week ago. A week ago people might have still cared, but now not even Dave cared about the scores.
It was too little, too late. Yes, the food was awful and the hotel dreary, but the problem was sitting in court, listening to repetitive, obscure testimony, watching the lawyers bicker. Just declare a mistrial and send us all home.
But the judge probably couldn’t do that, not while there were still twelve jurors.
Thursday evening two of the women revealed something Teddy had told them. He had tried so hard to stay on the jury because his wife was going to write a book about her experiences during the trial. “She thought that that’s what people would really be interested in.”
“In her?” Seth couldn’t help himself.
Apparently, yes. She had always thought that she deserved to be famous and this was her chance.
The wrong place. Seriously wrong.
* * * *
Friday morning Sally came to their 6:00 a.m. breakfast and told them that the court would, once again, not be holding a Friday session. “But”—she didn’t give them time to protest—“you will be moving to a different facility today so you need—”
“Oh, no,” Keith interrupted. “You aren’t sending us to the Dixie Motor Court, are you? That place is trash.”
“I heard it had bedbugs.” Delia was horrified. “You can’t do that. You can’t.”
Bedbugs. It occurred to Seth that there might be some utility in bedbugs. If the jurors got infected, they would carry the little creatures into the courtroom—in fact, Seth would lovingly escort his—and then the courthouse would have to be closed and fumigated.
Of course his mom would shave his head and make him strip buck naked in the driveway before she let him into any house of hers. And maybe not just his head.
Sally was smiling. “I think you’ll be very pleased. We have been working on this for several days. It is a bed-and-breakfast on the other side of town. You will be the only guests, so you will have more freedom. There will be an exercise facility, and you will be able to sit outdoors.”
Exercise...outdoors...
“You don’t mean the Wildflower Inn?” Joan asked. “I hear that’s lovely.”
“Isn’t that closed for renovation?” Stephanie asked. “Our bakery used to sell to them, but not for a couple of months.”
“I can’t confirm where we are going,” Sally said. “Indeed, there will be workmen there during the day while you are at court, but not in the evenings or weekends.”
People were excited. No one had actually been to the inn—it was a high-end place—but several of them knew a lot about it. Each room was named for a Carolina wildflower, and each one had toiletries scented with the fragrance of that wildflower.
“Do you think that they will give us the products?” Heather asked. “I really hope so, but they probably won’t because they are super expensive. A friend of mine won a raffle basket at the St. John’s school fair. She didn’t know anyone, she was only there because she had gotten a ticket from this person—”
Seth stopped listening. He got up to get more coffee, and on his way asked Keith about the inn.
“It’s been open about three years and hasn’t been doing great. It’s got new owners, and they’re adding on a ballroom, trying to get into the wedding business. So they probably gave the court a really good deal since they’re closed.”
“Are there going to be holes in the roof and no hot water?”
“Anything’s better than the Dixie Motor Court.”
Seth traveled enough that he could pack quickly. As soon as he was finished, he went back to the breakfast room to help Caitlin organize her boxes. Stephanie was already working on it.
“Do you believe,” she asked, “when the deputies packed up Teddy’s things they took the Revelation game? Apparently he told them to be sure and get it because it was his.”
“Oh, I do believe it.” But he didn’t mind. He never wanted to see that game again.
From the front seat of the van—they no longer needed a bus—Sally explained the new room assignments. There were eleven rooms and no elevator so Joan and Delia would share the ADA-compliant room on the first floor. Three of the rooms were on the third floor, and Sally had decided that Caitlin, Marcus, and Seth were the most suited to those rooms because the last flight of stairs was difficult.
“I made these decisions,” Sally said. “I am taking full responsibility. But I’m open to discussion.”
Someone accepting responsibility? Someone thinking the jurors were capable of having a thought?
But the plan was a good one. After Delia assured Joan that the only thing that could wake her was a child who needed her, those two ladies confirmed that they would rather share a room than subject their knees to stairs. Marcus, Caitlin, and Seth didn’t mind the stairs.
The trip seemed to be taking a while, and soon the jurors who knew the area said that they couldn’t be going to the Wildflower. It turned out that the van driver was lost, so Keith had to move to the front to tell him where to go.
Maybe the whole trial would be going better if the jury could be in charge.
* * * *
The Wildflower Inn was in a small village nestled in the mountains. The inn itself was an old white-shuttered stone building that sat close to the narrow Main Street. The front porch was marked off with caution tape, and the back parking lot was full of construction vehicles and a dumpster.
They came in through the back door, but the rear entry was luxurious and welcoming, a freshly painted square room with a high ceiling and stone floor. In the center was a round hall table that held a flower arrangement, brochures for local activities, and a dish of foil-wrapped chocolates. Two armchairs, comfortably padded in a flowery fabric, sat on either side of the double doors. Along one wall was a coffee station, and in the far corner was a freestanding water dispenser with a five-gallon jug of springwater inverted on top of the cooler.
Fresh water... Marcus was already at the dispenser filling a glass—a glass made of actual glass. The motel had only had disposable glasses.
The air was full of the light floral scent of the flower arrangement and the warm sweetness of something baking. The motel had smelled of burnt toast, pancake syrup, and lemon-scented disinfectant.
He had stayed in plenty of places as nice as this, but clearly most of the others hadn’t. Keith and Dave, farmer and trucker, stood together, looking as if they were expecting someone to come tell them that they didn’t belong here. Yvette looked frightened, but everyone els
e seemed to relax. Tensed shoulders went down, breathing deepened.
A middle-aged innkeeper invited them into the breakfast room.
How different it was from their last breakfast room. Tall windows on one side filled the room with light while the front wall had French doors leading out to the porch. Fresh cranberry scones sat on a platter next to a silver coffee service.
The scones probably had as much fat and sugar as fast food, but Seth didn’t care. They were worth the calories.
The innkeeper told them there was an exercise studio across the parking lot, but they needed to be careful of construction traffic. Unfortunately, the front porch was not stable, but there was a patio in the back, and most of the rooms had balconies. There were sitting rooms on both the first and second floors, but they were adjacent to the construction work. They were not to talk to the construction workers, and the construction workers had been warned not to talk to them. He then apologized for having to remove the televisions from the rooms. The inn would provide breakfast, but they didn’t have the staff for the other meals.
“Can we use your kitchen?” Marcus asked. “If we clean up afterward?”
The innkeeper shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”
Sally then spoke. Because the jurors would be staying on three separate floors with several places to spend their free time, they could not be as closely supervised as before. But she had assured the judge that no one had shown any inclination to discuss the case. One of his concerns was that they not splinter themselves into factions, so she hoped that they would be mindful of that. Again they were not to enter each other’s rooms.
“But aren’t all the rooms different?” one of the younger women asked. “I want to see them.”
Everyone seemed to agree, and Sally promised that she would arrange a time for that.
Clearly she had stopped feeling that she needed the judge’s approval for everything.
Marcus had already disappeared into the kitchen, so Seth and Caitlin followed Sally up to the third floor without him. The staircase between the second and third floor was stacked against an exposed brick wall. The treads were unfinished, a few of the risers were missing, and the railings were raw two-by-fours. Sally assured them that it was safe.
At the top of the stairs she stopped. Through the mass of the brick wall Seth could hear the faint grind of a power saw.
“Listen, you two,” Sally said, “I don’t have the manpower to put a deputy up here all the time. The obvious thing would have been to put three men up here or three women, but every time I tried to do that, I ran into problems. Either the stairs would be too much or I was going to be setting up factions. And I am aware that some of you are more resilient emotionally than others. So this is the arrangement I could live with, but it involves trusting you.”
“You can,” Caitlin said instantly.
Yeah, she hates me way too much.
Yesterday in line outside the courtroom he had asked her if she was still mad at him.
“No, I’m not mad,” she had said. “I am disappointed.”
That had stung. Sure, he disappointed himself like when he suddenly stopped being able to land a trick he had been doing for months and months, but other people? When had other people been disappointed in Seth Street?
Except Caitlin when she had been in high school and he had stopped returning her calls. She would have been disappointed then.
“You’re both young,” Sally was saying, “you’re attractive, and you’re bored. It wouldn’t be surprising, but I have to ask you to think of this as part of your juror’s oath and also as something personal from me. I trust you. Please don’t let me down.”
Seth wasn’t sure that the juror’s oath meant a thing to him anymore, but an individual pledge to Sally...oh, yeah, that counted.
He put out his hand. “We know that this is a bitch for you too.”
She blinked in surprise...and then blinked again as if she was trying to fight off some tears. She shook his hand with a nice firm grip, then moved on, probably uncomfortable with the emotion of the moment. “There’s one room in the front and two in the back. The front one is much bigger so you might as well take that, Caitlin.”
Caitlin was shaking her head. “Part of your calculus had to be Marcus needing to escape from the crowd. Give him the bigger room, especially if he is going to cook sometimes.”
Sally nodded. She didn’t care. So Seth was in the Mountain Laurel room, while Caitlin was across the hall in the Iris.
Seth’s dad had once shown him how straight grained the wood from a mountain laurel bush was, but the bushes never grew large enough to be of much commercial use. The blossoms were pink and white, so Seth assumed that his room would be overpoweringly girly, but it was done in soothing neutrals and sage greens with only a few touches of pink and maroon. The bathroom was awesome with a heated floor, a glass-walled shower with multiple heads, a whirlpool tub, and a toilet that raised its lid as you came near.
This would make a difference. But would it be enough? Perfumed bath salts weren’t going to make it much easier to sit through the lawyers’ little reindeer games. There were times during court when he wanted to stand up and break his chair over someone’s head.
He had seen pictures of beautiful mountains destroyed by logging or mining. He knew of places where the discharge from chemical plants had polluted the water. The courtroom, someplace that was supposed to be noble, was like that, full of corrupt politicians, greedy financiers, and asshole lawyers.
Did it have to be this way? Didn’t the country stand for more than this?
He had worn the American flag on his sleeve at the Olympics.
If you got a silver or bronze medal in an international competition, you had to be a complete shit not to want the gold to go to your teammate. That way during the medal ceremony, you heard your own national anthem. What a moment that had been, seeing all three Stars and Stripes being raised. Halfway through “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the guy on top had pulled the other two of them up with him, and the three of them had put their arms around each other’s shoulders and listened to the rest of the anthem.
So maybe he was a player, careless and irresponsible. Not in the sexual sense, like Caitlin probably thought, but in the whole citizenship department. He didn’t have a clue what was in the tax return that he signed every year, and when he had registered for the draft at eighteen, he had done so without a moment’s worry. He wouldn’t be called up. The country had an all-volunteer military. Other people could put themselves in harm’s way on his behalf. National security was their problem, not his.
But justice...maybe this was where he had to step up, where he had to take some responsibility.
CHAPTER SEVEN
One of the many random things that Caitlin knew was that wild irises were called dwarf irises because they only grew six inches tall, but she supposed that “dwarf” wasn’t a word that evoked much elegance, and the Iris room was elegant indeed. The heavy drapes, the bedcover, and the chair had a purple-blue Regency strip on a cream background. Cream-painted wainscoting circled the room, topped by a iris-colored chair rail; the crown molding was also painted iris; the carpeting and other accents were moss green.
The decor was too traditional for Caitlin’s taste, and her romantic alter ego Aurora probably would have liked to add a gauzy canopy over the bed and some pretty ribbons, but it was a wonderful improvement on the blandness of the Best Western.
The bedroom was king sized with a light layer of memory foam supported by a firm mattress. The bathroom was bigger than her kitchen in San Francisco, much bigger. The toilet had a motion-activated lid and a bidet feature controlled by a panel on the wall. The towels were on a heated rack, and behind the door hung two thick white bathrobes embroidered with the inn’s logo. The claw-foot tub was so deep that there was a little stool to help you get in, and the glass-walled showers had six
different heads, all with adjustable spray patterns.
This was a room for romantic-weekend sex, for anniversary sex, for first-time-away-together sex.
What had Sally been thinking, putting her up here with Seth?
I need to know that I can trust you, Sally had said.
Surely there had to have been another arrangement. If you started with Marcus being up here because he needed more alone time than anyone else, then why not put Norma up here with Caitlin? Norma could do the stairs...but maybe Sally wanted Norma to keep her eye on Yvette, and you wouldn’t want to isolate Yvette up here. What about some pairing of April, Heather, and Stephanie? No, separating two of them would lead to a faction. What about...
Every combination Caitlin could think of had problems.
So this was it. Only two doors and a narrow, unguarded hall lay between her king-sized bed and Seth. And the fact that Sally trusted them.
Caitlin looked around the room again. The Queen Anne furniture was starting to grow on her. And to be here by herself. No one would want to talk at her, no one would say, “Oh, are you warm?” when she had taken her sweater off or ask her if she had gotten cold when she went to put it back on. Best of all, she could actually make a few of her own decisions. She could sit in the first-floor lounge or the second-floor library. She could even open the door and go out to the patio or gym without violating a court order.
She changed into her exercise clothes and went out into the hall. No deputy watched her close the door. She started down the makeshift stairs. No other juror asked her where she was going. It was so delicious that she wanted to go back to her room and lather, rinse, and repeat.
Only when she had gone through the second-floor hallway and reached the front steps did she see anyone.
“Isn’t this place amazing?” Heather enthused. “Have you looked around yet? It’s like being in a movie. The chairs in the sitting room—that’s what they call the one on the first floor, the sitting room, and the library is up here. Or is it like being in a game of Clue? They are building a ballroom, you know. Are you going over to the exercise place? Have you seen the schedule? Sometimes we can be on the first floor with the machines because they’re giving classes in the yoga studio. Then sometimes we need to be in the yoga studio because they have members who use the machines. I’ve never done yoga. Have you? Do you think you could teach the rest of us? My sister said that yoga would help us sit in the courtroom all day.”
The Fourth Summer Page 14
