The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “It ain’t nothing to get a hiding from your daddy. I reckon she’d do what I do: take what he dishes out and don’t give him the satisfaction of seeing you cry. That Erma’s got a temper, though. You wouldn’t think it, being so pretty and little like she is, but underneath all that proper speaking and store-bought clothes, she’s a regular wildcat. One time last spring she caught me copying the homework sums off of Billy Lanier, and she smacked my hand so hard with that ruler—”

  Henry’s eyes widened, but he gave no other sign of quickened interest. “Miss Morton was your teacher, then?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Was she a good one?”

  The boy kicked at pebbles with the toe of one scuffed boot. “Middlin’, I reckon. I ain’t so hot on studying myself, so it didn’t make me no never mind. But Miss Erma wasn’t overmuch set on making us learn. Seems like she was always looking out the schoolroom window, a-watching the road. Every now and again, a carload of her friends would pull up, and she would set us to writing lines while she sashayed off to visit with them a spell.”

  “Some young man had come to court her, then?”

  “Naw. Just a crowd of her friends, I reckon. Nobody special. Maybe she didn’t like to be cooped up in the school, neither. I’d’a done the same if I could.”

  Henry nodded sympathetically, reframing the story in his mind: lively, educated young woman trapped in a stagnant little town, yearning for excitement . . . Lonely . . . A questing spirit longing to be free . . . There were other ways to look at the matter, of course, but more negative constructions would not suit the slant of the story.

  He noticed a movement at the ground-floor window where the boy had first appeared. Henry’s expression of rapt interest did not change, but he kept his eyes on the window, and a few moments later the curtain was pushed back farther, and two round blue eyes peeped over the sill, watching him intently. A mop of blond ringlets haloed the pale little face, whose expression registered more curiosity than alarm. Henry decided not to smile this time, nor to proffer coins to entice the child outside. He judged that showing rapt interest in his conversation with the child’s older brother would lure her out of the house to claim her share of the attention. He continued to nod and smile at the boy, glancing over at the window every ten seconds or so to gauge the reaction of the tiny observer. When he glanced up again, the child was gone.

  Silently, Henry counted to ten, and sure enough the front door opened and the halo-haired girl marched out, and draped her arm around her brother’s waist, leaning her head against his side. Her bright blue eyes, though, were fixed unblinkingly on the stranger in the black overcoat.

  “And this must be your sister . . . Moselle,” said Henry, remembering the name after a hasty mental rummage through a list of French wines.

  The little girl was regarding him with that thoughtfully grave expression one sees in the very old and very young alike. She was bundled in an old brown coat, far too big for her, and a black knit cap, with her ringlets spilling out of it to frame her face in an aureole of silvery curls. Her skin was so translucently pale that her eyes seemed to smolder in contrast, and her cheekbones were so prominent that Henry wondered if she got enough to eat.

  “How do you do?” he said to the solemn child. “Your brother here has been telling me that you are someone who knows things.”

  She bobbed her head with what might have been assent, and fixed her gaze at the ground.

  “What can you tell me about the man who died over there across the street? Did you hear about that?”

  She shook her head, an almost imperceptible nod. “He’s sad.”

  “Yes, I expect he was,” said Henry. “But I’m sure he’d want people to know what really happened to him, especially if it would get his daughter out of jail. If she is not the one who hurt him, he’d want that fact known, don’t you think?”

  Moselle gave no sign that she was listening. Henry wondered if she were quite right in the head. Still, you heard stories sometimes about people in these hills having some sort of supernatural gift, a remnant of their Celtic origins, he supposed, either in the folk memory or—if you believed in such things—the gift itself. He had seen people who seemed to have the gift before, on the other side of the world, and so he was less inclined to let conventional wisdom restrict his beliefs. It wasn’t the sort of thing he could write about in his articles, though. He never shared his personal beliefs with the great unwashed readership of the newspaper.

  He smiled encouragingly at the wraith-like child, wondering if another nickel would improve her skill in conversation, but before he could test this theory, Moselle looked up at him and said, “Who’s yonder little girl?”

  She seemed to be pointing directly at him. Henry looked around, but there was no one else in the street except Rose and Shade, standing back at the car, deep in conversation. Surely the child was not referring to Rose, who probably hadn’t been called a “little girl” even when she herself was five years old, but who else could this peculiar child be talking about?

  Bending down level with the cloud of curls, he said gently, “Do you mean the lady over there standing next to the automobile?”

  The golden ringlets bobbed: no. Pointing again at Henry, she grasped the sleeve of her brother’s coat and whispered into his ear. The boy said nothing in reply, but his expression reflected bewilderment. He shrugged, and whispered something in reply, but she shook her head vehemently, nodding in Henry’s direction, and whispered again.

  When she had finished, the boy reddened and relayed the message. “She says she wants to know who the little girl is. She says it’s the one standing right there behind you. That’s what she says.”

  Henry froze for a moment. “Do you see anyone?”

  “Naw. I ain’t got it. But I never knowed her to be wrong, mister.”

  Henry’s spine was a splinter of ice. He felt the hair prickle on the back of his neck. “What does this little girl look like?”

  The boy hesitated, and glanced at his sister, who nodded for him to go on. “Moselle says she don’t look like us. She said the girl has Cherokee hair and cat eyes behind her spectacles. She’s wearing a long robe like the wise men in the manger scene. Only it’s red with flowers on it. Does that make sense to you, mister?”

  Henry felt a chill that had nothing to do with the wind. He nearly turned around to look behind him, but he thought better of it. The street was empty. He knew that. Empty to everyone except Moselle. He forgot about the Morton case. “Ask your sister how old this little girl is, and if there’s anything else she can see.”

  Moselle nodded and whispered again. Her brother translated. “She says the girl is little, but maybe eight or nine years old. Wearing spectacles. And she has funny shoes over her socks. Just blocks of wood, with rope between the toes to hold ’em on.” He said this last bit quizzically, as if he did not believe it, but Henry did.

  “You can see her?” he said to the pale child.

  Moselle nodded. Then she stopped and stared off to the side as if someone were speaking to her. After a few moments, she pulled her brother close and whispered a few words.

  Again, the boy relayed the message. “She said she can’t understand what the little girl is saying. But she keeps saying two words over and over. One of ’em is ‘o-hen-roo.’ And the other one sounds like it might be the little girl’s name. Sugar Eye?”

  “No,” Henry murmured. “It isn’t her name.”

  “Does it mean anything to you?”

  Sugar eye. The word might sound like that to one who spoke no Japanese. But he heard it for what it was. “Oh, yes,” he murmured. “I understand. I do.”

  “Henry!” He heard the clattering of Rose’s high heels, and a moment later she was at his side. “Shade thinks he has enough shots of the town. He thinks we ought to start back before it gets dark. They don’t have steep, curvy roads where he’s from.”

  Henry nodded. “Yes, I don’t think we need to stay any longer. Just—”r />
  Jake was tugging at his sister’s arm. “We gotta go inside, mister. Not, Mama’ll catch us sure. Come on, Moselle.”

  The fairy child was still staring up at Henry, or rather at a point just past his shoulder. After a moment’s pause, she raised her hand and waggled her fingers in the universal child’s gesture of farewell. But she was not waving at Henry.

  THE WISE COUNTY COURTHOUSE was not what Carl had been expecting in the way of rural architecture. He had envisioned a dark fortress of quarried local limestone, looking like a cross between a prison and a castle, but if such a courthouse had ever existed in Wise, it had not survived the War Between the States. Around the turn of the century the county had razed its antebellum courthouse, and replaced it with an ornate palace of yellow sandstone, complete with arched windows, battlements, and a pair of open towers, from which he could imagine a costumed actress declaiming, “ ‘Wherefore art thou, Romeo?’ ”

  However, the object of their visit was no innocent Juliet languishing in the tower; she was a prisoner in less picturesque quarters: a holding cell in the basement jail.

  “What did you think of the brother?” he asked Mrs. Coeburn as they contemplated the whimsically incongruous courthouse architecture.

  She shrugged. “About like this courthouse, I suppose. Hick town product with pretensions to better things.”

  “But he is certainly protective of his sister,” said Mrs. Manning. “I do like to see a warm family feeling.”

  “He is completely in control of the situation,” said Mrs. Coeburn. “Whether his motives are noble we cannot say.”

  Carl nodded. “There’s money to be made out of a story like this, you know.”

  Mrs. Coeburn shot him an approving glance that plainly said he was smarter than he looked. “Indeed there is. I doubt if Mr. Harley Morton is up to writing a book about the family tragedy, but as a glib salesman he might fancy himself on the lecture circuit.”

  “Or if he doesn’t want to work that hard, ma’am, there’s always Hollywood. He could sell the story to the movies.”

  “That’s true,” said Mrs. Manning. “Thanks to the Lonesome Pine film, there is a great interest in this part of the world just now.”

  “A movie about the trial!” Mrs. Coeburn closed her eyes. “Surely no decent, educated woman would allow such a thing.”

  “If she’s given a choice,” said Carl. “Times are hard, and lawyers don’t come cheap.”

  “Perhaps our defense fund can save her from that public shame.”

  As they crossed the deserted main street, Mrs. Manning took Carl’s arm. “ I am so glad you came along with us, Mr. Jennings. I have never been in a jail before.”

  Carl hadn’t either, but he contrived to look world-weary and sophisticated, as befitted the representative of the Johnson City Staff. He would have to take up smoking to complete the effect. “It’s only a small jail, I expect,” he told her. “The really dangerous prisoners would get taken elsewhere, and of course once the trial is over, they’d go off to prison. I reckon the inmates she’s locked up with here will be mostly petty thieves and drunks.” He had meant to be reassuring, but the scandalized expressions on the faces of his companions told him that he had failed.

  “That poor girl!” Mrs. Manning stopped in the middle of the street and pulled a handkerchief out of her coat pocket, dabbing at her eyes.

  Mrs. Coeburn glanced at her companion. Her lips tightened like a drawstring purse. “We came to see for ourselves. So let us do our duty, Dolly. With Christian fortitude.”

  “I wonder if we should have brought her anything?”

  Carl willed himself not to smile. Southern tradition demanded that when one goes visiting, one takes along a hostess present, but he never thought he’d see that dictum stretched to cover visits to a county jail. “Perhaps you could wait and see if she needs anything in particular,” he said, taking Mrs. Manning’s arm and gently propelling her forward, so that they could stop having the discussion in the middle of the street. As they reached the sidewalk, Carl saw a scowling, unshaven man staring at them from a ground-level window of the courthouse. That must be the jail, he thought. He ventured a tentative wave to the man in the window, and received a mournful nod in return. Then he shepherded the ladies from Knoxville up the steps of the main entrance and into the courthouse.

  For a rural county building, its interior was surprisingly elegant: polished marble floors and a wide staircase with a black wrought-iron banister of floral scrollwork, touched here and there with gold leaf. But the splendor stopped on the ground floor of the building. After asking directions from a passing clerk, they were led to a plain wooden door down the hallway, which opened to reveal a flight of steep and narrow steps down into the basement, where a low-ceilinged warren of rooms and passages comprised the county lockup.

  Mrs. Coeburn insisted that Carl go first, so that if one of them lost her footing on the stairs, he would break her fall. With more trepidation than gallantry, he obliged her, and much to his relief they arrived at the bottom of the staircase without incident. A khaki-uniformed jailer, who had been observing their approach with a wary frown, stepped forward to greet them. “Afternoon, sir. Ladies. Y’all the folks Mr. Hubbard called over about?” He addressed this remark to Carl, who, being male, was the presumptive leader of the delegation.

  Before Carl could reply, Mrs. Coeburn pushed past him and glared up at the deputy. With one gloved hand, she drew a visiting card out of her purse and thrust it at him. “We represent the ladies club of Knoxville. We are here to see Miss Morton.”

  “Yes, ma’am. So Mr. Hubbard told me. He says I’m to stay with you to make sure you don’t try to discuss the case with her. That’s her lawyer’s rule, you understand, not the sheriff’s orders, but we’ll oblige them. Not that I think she’d talk to you about the case, anyhow. Keeps to herself, that one. Well, y’all come on back.”

  They followed the deputy down a dim and narrow concrete passage, lined with the bare rock walls that comprised the foundation of the building. He led them into a narrow room separate from the other cells in the complex. The room had the same rock walls as the hallway, and one narrow window set high in the wall across from the cell. “Folks to see you, Miss Morton!” the deputy called out as they crossed the threshold.

  The deputy pulled a wooden chair out from the wall, and sat down a few feet away from the cell, while Carl and the Knoxville ladies approached the bars, somewhat embarrassed to be looking at another human being as if she were a zoo exhibit.

  Erma Morton looked tall only because she was slender. In person she was too scrawny to be really beautiful, but her thick dark hair was cut into a fashionable, permed bob, framing a pale, bony face. She stared at them with big gray eyes without a flicker of emotion. Instead of prison garb, she wore a simple blue wool dress, black cotton stockings, and low-heeled shoes. Her cell had the air of a furnished room, not luxurious by any means, but still equipped with more comforts than were usually afforded to inmates of a jail. The metal frame bed had a pillow and a thick mattress, covered by a red patchwork quilt. A gray wool blanket was folded neatly at the foot of the bed, and beside it stood a spindly wooden table, piled high with books, papers, and letters addressed to the prisoner. In one corner of the cell sat a metal floor lamp next to an applewood rocking chair, where Erma Morton had been sitting when her visitors entered the room.

  She set a white china coffee mug on the floor, walked to the bars, and stood looking back at them with an aloof smile that betrayed no hint of embarrassment at her circumstances. She did not speak, but continued to regard them with a cool appraising stare, as if they, not she, were the exhibits.

  Mrs. Coeburn thrust her gloved hand through the bars. “Miss Morton, I am Mrs. Alexander Coeburn, president of the Knoxville Women’s Club, and this is my colleague Mrs. Manning. I wish we could have met you under more propitious circumstances.”

  The prisoner acknowledged the greeting with a slight nod, and turned her gaze on Carl. Her rais
ed eyebrows conveyed her message clearly: surely he was not a member of the ladies club.

  “Carl Jennings, ma’am,” he said, responding to the unspoken question. “Reporter for the Johnson City Staff in Tennessee. We wanted to make sure that you were being treated well.”

  Erma Morton shrugged, gesturing toward the contents of her cell. “Home sweet home.”

  The two club women stood in silence for a few moments, gazing at the crowded cell, which indeed had a homelike aspect. “Well,” said Mrs. Manning, finding her voice at last. “I suppose that some effort has been made to provide for your comfort, Miss Morton. And of course you are kept separate from the male inmates of the jail.”

  “Oh, yes, they are most particular about that.”

  “And you are well?” asked Mrs. Coeburn.

  The girl inclined her head in indifferent assent. “Tolerable.”

  “We have been to see your attorney, and he tells us that you are not permitted to speak to anyone about the circumstances of your case, because you have made an arrangement with a newspaper syndicate.”

  Erma Morton hesitated, running her finger down a bar of the cell door. “My brother is seeing to all that. I just do what he tells me.”

  Mrs. Coeburn’s bosom heaved with deep breaths as she marshaled her arguments. “But surely you must see how this looks to the public, my dear. Selling your story to the yellow dog press. You appear to be profiting from the misfortune of your father’s death.”

  The girl looked away, but her face showed no more emotion than it had before. “I don’t know about that, ma’am. That’s Harley’s concern, not mine.”

  Carl felt sorry for the girl, who didn’t look up to being brow-beaten by the Tennessee dowagers. “Trials don’t come cheap,” he said. “I think most people get all the justice they can pay for.”

  Mrs. Coeburn glared at him for voicing this undemocratic sentiment, but the prisoner flashed him a grateful smile, and the merest suggestion of a nod of agreement. “I’m sorry you came all this way for nothing,” she said, looking straight at him. “But I must not converse with you.”