I hate sarcasm. But I have to agree we’d be in a lot more trouble than Caroline Johnson if we told what we saw. And she knows it.
We reach the car and get in fast. T.J. starts the engine, then turns to me. “We’ll figure something out.” He backs up and wheels the car around without turning on the headlights. “Hope, what if Caroline knew about the money Coach was giving Rita?”
My brain hasn’t even gotten that far. “Do you think she did? Of course she did. She had to know, didn’t she? I mean, with him not making all that much money, and her not making any, and a thousand dollars going out each month? You can’t hide a thing like that. She would have known.”
“Uh-huh. And that would give her motive. I don’t know if she knew about her husband and Rita, or the money, but it’s got to be good enough for reasonable doubt.” The car hits a rut, and I remember to fasten my seat belt. T.J. still hasn’t turned on his headlights. I know he’s trying to get out without anybody seeing us.
“Plus,” I say, gripping the dash, “we’ve got those rejected loans. They give her a motive for killing her husband—money.”
“And the canceled checks,” T.J. adds. “All great stuff for giving her motive.”
“Motive, which is something Jeremy never had. Raymond has to get Caroline back on the stand and ask her about the money. Just asking her about it should give the jury reasonable doubt.”
T.J. is quiet for a minute. Then he glances over at me. “Only … only that means everybody will know about the money he paid to Rita. They’ll say things about Coach and Rita, whether they’re true or not, Hope.”
“Do you think I care if the world discovers Rita and Coach were having an affair, or worse? The only thing I care about is getting my brother out of jail.”
T.J. still hasn’t turned on the headlights. He quits talking and keeps taking peeks in the rearview mirror. I turn around and stare out the back window. Far behind us, about the length of a football field, I see two headlights, white eyes watching us through the darkness.
“T.J.!” Panic rises like bile in my throat.
“I know.” He touches my knee, then puts his hand back on the steering wheel. I don’t understand how he’s staying on this road without headlights. He must really be familiar with this part of Grain. The road winds one way, then the other, with no warning. He takes a turn, and for an instant there are no lights behind us. Then they pop up again. “Who’d be following us this time of night? If Mrs. Johnson called the police, they’d just arrest us and get it over with.”
“It’s the white pickup truck,” I mutter. When he frowns at me, I explain as fast as I can.
“Why didn’t you tell me somebody was following you?”
Because I told Chase. “I should have. What can we do now?”
He rolls down his window. A rush of humid air floods the car, bringing in clover and dust and a faint scent of skunk. “I’m pretty sure there’s a path up on the left,” he shouts above the wind. “I think we can lose him if I can find—There it is!”
He brakes, and we swerve left. Weeds slap the sides of the car. There’s a blur of fence, barbed wire. The car skids at a ditch and stops.
I look behind us in time to see a pickup speed by our turnoff. “He’s gone. You did it! You lost him.”
T.J. leans his forehead on the steering wheel. “I think I’m turning in my license.” He looks over at me. “Was it the pickup?”
“You didn’t see it?” My heart is clawing to get out of my chest. “It was definitely a pickup. I couldn’t tell the color, but it had to be the same one. Why would anybody do that?”
In almost a whisper, he says what I’ve already figured out. “Because somebody doesn’t want us investigating Coach’s murder.”
Rita’s car is gone when T.J. pulls up in front of my house. He insists on walking me to the door and checking inside before he leaves. We’re both so tired we can barely stand up. “See you in court,” he says, glancing at his watch. “In a couple of hours.” He starts down the sidewalk but turns back, hands in his pockets. “My dad needs the car again today. I asked Chase to give us a ride to court.”
“Okay.” I try to pretend like it doesn’t matter one way or the other. Then I race inside, and the first thing I do is text Chase. I can’t text everything I want to, but I get in the general outline of the night, knowing he won’t get the message for a couple of hours anyway.
Two minutes later, my cell rings. “Chase?”
“Hope, what did you do? Tell me I didn’t read your text right.”
I tell him about the loans, the checks, seeing Coach’s wife standing up, and about the white pickup truck. When I stop, he doesn’t say anything. “Chase? Don’t be mad. I had to do it. I needed to see the crime scene for myself.”
The silence is too long. Finally, he says, “I thought … I was going to tell you I couldn’t help you, that we shouldn’t see each other anymore.”
Something burns a hole in my chest. I don’t want it to matter. I don’t want him to matter.
“But I can’t,” he says.
“Can’t see me anymore?” I ask.
“Can’t stop seeing you.”
Neither of us says anything, and I picture our breaths traveling from cell tower to cell tower and back.
“Start over, Hope. At the beginning. Tell me everything.”
I do. I go into more detail this time.
When I’m done, he says, “Those checks? Hope, what do you think they mean?”
That’s what it comes back to—the checks made out to Rita. “I don’t know,” I tell him. “But as soon as Rita steps in the door, you can bet I’m going to find out.”
23
An hour later, Rita still hasn’t come home. I pace the living room, trying to come up with an explanation for those thousand-dollar checks. If Rita did have an affair with Coach, who’s she seeing now? I never ask. I never want to know.
I have to do something, so I search Jeremy’s room for his batting gloves. Then I check Rita’s room for her old high school yearbooks.
Zilch. Nothing.
After another restless hour, I stretch out on the couch to see if I can catch a few minutes’ sleep. But when I shut my eyes, I see Caroline Johnson standing at the window, watching. Or I see Coach Johnson curled up on the barn floor.
A few minutes before six, I can’t wait a second longer. I have to call Raymond and tell him about the new evidence.
The phone rings and rings until the answering machine picks up. While I’m waiting for the beep, I try to figure out how to word what I want to say.
But before I can leave my message, Raymond answers. “Hello?”
“Raymond?” The machine finishes telling me to leave a message, then squawks out a beep. “Raymond, I’m sorry if I woke you up.”
“Hope?”
“Yeah. Listen, I have to tell you some stuff, but I don’t want to tell you how I got the information.”
“Just a minute.” He sounds like he’s underwater. I hear the receiver clunk. A minute later Raymond is back. “This better be good, Hope.”
I fill him in as much as I can without telling him about breaking and entering the crime scene and Coach’s office.
“Wait now,” he says. “How did you …? No. Never mind.” His sigh carries over the phone wires. “What does your mother say about the checks?”
“I haven’t asked her yet.” I don’t add that I haven’t had a chance to ask because she’s stayed out all night.
“Well, it might not matter.”
“Are you kidding?” I shout. “Raymond, how could that not matter? Don’t tell me I broke into Coach’s office for nothing!”
“I didn’t hear that,” Raymond says, not shocked or surprised, like he’s already figured out that much. “I don’t know about the checks, Hope. But the other things, the loan apps and the bills, nobody’s said anything about Coach’s finances. Where there’s debt, there’s motive. How many loan refusals were there?”
“I’m not sure.
Three or four, at least. T.J. could tell you.”
“T.J.?”
Rats! I shouldn’t have brought him into it. Such a long silence follows that I’m not sure if Raymond is still on the line. “Raymond?”
“Hmmm? Sorry. I’m thinking.…” More silence. “Okay. I’ll level with you, Hope. Your testimony didn’t help our insanity plea any.”
“I’m sorry, Raymond.” I get a flashback of that second in court when I realized I’d walked right into the prosecution’s trap. Keller looked at me like I’d single-handedly won him his ticket to Washington, D.C., and bigger fish to fry. I can see his nose hair in his left nostril, the bead of sweat on his curled upper lip.
“It’s not just your testimony,” Raymond continues. “My expert witness didn’t do much for us either. Insanity is a hard sell around here. People are too practical.”
“Too insane, if you ask me.”
“Could be,” he admits.
“So what do we do?”
“I think I’m starting to agree with you, to tell the truth,” Raymond says.
“Really?” I’m not sure what I expected. Maybe that this was going to be a much harder sell to Raymond. “That’s great!”
Raymond keeps going, and I think he’s talking to himself more than to me. But I don’t mind. “We need to begin creating doubt, give the jury a few reasons to find Jeremy not guilty.” He sighs. “Thank God for the double plea—not guilty by reason of insanity, and not guilty.”
Maybe Raymond is right. Maybe that really is something to thank God for. I haven’t done much thanking lately. I have a feeling that even in jail, Jeremy isn’t forgetting to thank God. I can almost hear him: God, thanks for these bars that make cool shadows. And thanks for my roommate, Bubba, and the pretty tattoos on his arms … and legs, and shoulders, and head.
“Hope, did you hear me?”
“What?”
“I said, I’m going to issue a subpoena to have Caroline Johnson testify in person. If there’s an objection, the judge will have to rule. We could establish motive. And that’s more than Keller has done with Jeremy. They haven’t even suggested a motive.”
“Yes! Raymond, would it help if you had two people who’ve seen Mrs. Johnson standing on her own and staring out her window?”
“Not if those circumstances would put the two people in prison for breaking and entering.”
“Got it. It will be so great to watch her squirm on the witness stand, though.” Sometime during our conversation, the phone cord got wrapped around my arm. I work on unwrapping it now. “Don’t forget to ask her if she can get out of the wheelchair on her own. And ask about money. And the loans. And those canceled checks to Rita.”
“Easy, Hope,” he interrupts. “I don’t even know if the court will allow this. And if they do, we could be too late. Trial is winding down, whether we want it to or not. My witness list isn’t that long.”
“What about Rita? What about her testimony? Are you still going to make her tell all those stories about Jeremy, the ones that make him sound crazy?” I hate those stories. Rita tells them to strangers in bars and grocery stores: about the winter Jeremy wandered off without his shoes or coat and ended up with frostbite; about the time he walked up to the screen at the movie theater and punched a hole in it; or the day he grabbed a kid in his stroller and ran and ran until the police stopped him—Jeremy had seen the mother hit the little boy, slap him on the cheek.
“I’ll put Rita on hold and see if we still need her,” Raymond says.
“Great!” I’m glad Rita’s not testifying.
“There are a lot of variables here, Hope. I might not get permission to bring in Mrs. Johnson. And if I do put her on the stand, she may not be a good witness for us.”
“I know. Chase told me she’s not a big fan of my brother.”
“Chase? Chase Wells?”
“Y-yeah.” I shouldn’t have brought him into it either.
“Well, it’s true. Mrs. Johnson did some damage,” Raymond admits.
“Why would she say she was scared of Jeremy? People ignore my brother. They don’t understand him. They’re uneasy around him. But they’re not afraid of him.”
“Maybe she’s not scared of him,” Raymond says. “Maybe she just wants the jury to be scared of him.”
All right, Raymond! It’s the first time I’ve felt that Raymond believes Jer might be innocent. “You have to get the jury to see through that woman,” I tell him. I think about her dark figure watching T.J. and me leave the barn. “Um … you know those two people who saw her standing at her window?”
“I do. I know one of them rather well.” Raymond’s voice has a little smile to it.
“Well, they saw her tonight.… And I’m pretty sure she saw them too.”
“Hope!”
“Plus, if Mrs. Johnson owns a white pickup truck, or knows somebody who has one, it would explain a lot of things.”
“Do I want to know about this pickup truck?” Raymond asks.
Whether he wants to know or not, I tell him. And I tell him about the phone calls.
“I don’t like this,” Raymond says. I’ve been so afraid he wouldn’t believe me. Instead, I’m pretty sure he sounds … worried. “Have you told anybody about this?”
“I told Sheriff Wells, and he said he’d drive by the house at night, even though I know he didn’t take me seriously.”
“You need to call him, or dial 911, if anything like that happens again. I mean it, Hope. Or call me.”
I like having Raymond worry about me. A giant yawn comes up from nowhere, making me exhale into the phone.
“See if you can get some sleep,” Raymond says. “I need to get going on that petition to the court.”
“Good luck, Raymond.” I yawn again.
Before I can hang up, Raymond shouts, “Hope! You be careful, okay?”
In spite of everything, I feel myself smile. “Thanks, Raymond.”
24
“The defense would like to call Andrew Petersen.”
“Andrew Petersen!”
Chase, T.J., and I are in the back row of the courtroom. Raymond said it’s ok for me to be here now that I’ve testified, as long as the prosecutor doesn’t object, which he hasn’t yet, and which is why I’m lying low. On the drive over here, I sat in the front with Chase, leaving nowhere for T.J. except the backseat. Since T.J. didn’t say more than two words to either one of us the whole drive, I figure he doesn’t like riding in the backseat by himself. But I don’t have the energy to make sure everybody’s happy. I have to focus on the trial.
The problem is, I don’t understand how trials work because I slept through most of eighth-grade civics and government classes. Leaning toward Chase, I whisper, “Who’s Petersen and why is Raymond making him testify?”
“Petersen testified for the prosecution and claimed he saw Jeremy twice that morning—once galloping through the fields on that spotted horse.”
“Sugar.”
“Right,” T.J. throws in. “I was here for that part of the prosecution’s case too.”
I watch Petersen stroll across the courtroom. He’s tall, balding, and maybe fifty or sixty years old, wearing glasses and a black suit with a red tie. “So why would Raymond want him testifying again?”
T.J. and Chase exchange weird looks. Then Chase whispers, “Petersen claims he saw Jeremy carrying a bat and running away from the barn.”
I look over at Jeremy. He’s sitting up straight, his gaze on the judge.
I make myself listen to every word of the testimony as Raymond leads Mr. Petersen through the events of his morning, including what he ate for breakfast—instant oatmeal, wheat toast with fake butter, OJ, and coffee. He tells us where he found his morning paper—in the bushes—how loud the neighbors’ dogs are, and when he saw Jeremy. He’s a horrible storyteller, wasting time trying to recall details nobody on earth could care about.
“I’ve called that newspaper office to complain,” he drones, “seven times. Or was it ei
ght? I remember the sixth time clearly because it was after the Fourth of July and those kids down the street were still shooting off their firecrackers. Then I found my newspaper on the roof, saw it right up there when—”
Finally, Raymond retakes control and interrupts the winding, windy trail of Mr. Petersen’s thoughts. “Mr. Petersen, how do you know Jeremy Long, the defendant?”
“Everybody knows the Batter,” he answers. That’s the horrible name the Cleveland Plain Dealer gave to Coach Johnson’s murderer. CNN picked it up.
Raymond moves closer to the jury. “I meant before everybody became familiar with the defendant. When did you first come to know Jeremy?”
Petersen’s face wrinkles, and he looks like he’s pouting or about to cry. “I don’t understand.”
“Let me clarify,” Raymond says, smiling. But I’m thinking Raymond may be a better lawyer than he looks. “When did you and the defendant first meet?”
Petersen frowns. “I … I never met him.”
“No?” Raymond looks surprised. “But you’d seen him around? You knew what he looked like? Before the murder?”
“No,” Mr. Petersen admits.
Raymond looks puzzled and turns to the jury for his next question. “Then how did you know that the boy you saw running with a bat was Jeremy Long?”
“I didn’t. Not at first, leastwise.”
“So what you saw was a boy running with a bat and a boy riding a horse?” Raymond keeps going, leading Petersen on a trail that ends up with the man admitting he didn’t know who Jeremy was until the newspapers told him. And he hadn’t been wearing his glasses.
When Petersen is so confused he’d have trouble identifying himself, Raymond moves in for the kill. “So, you didn’t really know who the boy was running. And you didn’t report this alarming incident because, although you believed the bat was bloody after the papers reported it, at the time you assumed it was a muddy bat. Have I got that right?”
The Silence of Murder Page 15
