The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Carl hesitated. His instincts told him that it would be ungentlemanly to press her further, but, since he was paid to be a reporter, he was obliged to try. “Could you just tell me some little thing for my newspaper? Are they feeding you well?”

  She shrugged. “Try it for yourself. My meals are sent in from the diner.”

  “And what are you reading?”

  She glanced back at the little stack of books beside her bed. “Oh, this and that. Agatha Christie.”

  Carl’s eyes widened. “A murder mystery?”

  Her eyes narrowed, and she looked away. He had gone too far. But at least he had a scrap of news. Accused Murderess Reads Mysteries. He might be able to do something with that, but he’d feel like a hound for doing it. Why did she have to be so nice and ordinary?

  Mrs. Coeburn summoned a plaster smile. “Naturally, we do not wish to force you to say anything against your will,” she said. “We are only trying to help.”

  Erma Morton nodded. “Thank you for that, ma’am.”

  Carl fished a creased and slightly grubby business card out of his pocket, and passed it through the bars. “Just in case, Miss Morton,” he said. “If you want to say anything, get a message out to the world. This is where to find me.”

  Behind them the deputy stood up and pushed the chair back against the wall. “If you folks are ready, I’ll show you the way out.”

  As they crossed the threshold of the basement room, Carl glanced back at the cell and saw that Erma Morton was sitting in the applewood rocking chair with an open book in her lap. She did not watch them go.

  By the time they reached the courthouse entrance, Mrs. Manning had discovered the names and ages of the deputy’s children, and the pair of them were engrossed in a discussion of suitable Christmas gifts for each one. Mrs. Coeburn, who stamped through the corridor as if the floor were on fire, took no part in the conversation.

  Carl watched her out of the corner of his eye, and as they reached the foyer, he decided that since nothing could possibly make her any angrier than she already was, he would venture to speak to her. “I’m sorry your meeting with Miss Morton did not go as planned,” he said.

  She sniffed in his general direction, and said, “I came here for the truth and I mean to get it. You have been tolerably helpful this afternoon, so you may come along if you like.”

  Carl blinked. “Where are you going?”

  “Why, to see the district attorney, of course. I mean to get to the bottom of this.”

  EIGHT

  Lost on a muddy road in the rainy season.

  —MATSUO BASH

  Henry Jernigan barely spoke a word all evening. He stared off into space, scarcely rousing himself to respond to Rose’s conversational sallies over an indifferent dinner. He did not even bother to complain about the food.

  Despite Shade’s flatlander misgivings about winding mountain roads and deep ravines, which made him drive down the mountain at a snail’s pace, they had arrived in the town of Wise just at nightfall, checking into the hotel without attempting to look at the rest of the town. Further investigation could wait for daylight.

  The elegant courthouse, its light-colored stone shining in the twilight, towered over the little town like a great sand castle. The hotel, whose builder had harbored no such pretensions to Olde Worlde grandeur, was a white wooden structure more in keeping with the architectural character of the rest of the town. Only a narrow side street separated the courthouse from the inn, so that it would take them perhaps two minutes to reach the courtroom. The main entrance to the sprawling inn, a two-story portico supported by columns set under a pitched roof, sat on a brick walkway facing catty-corner to the main street. Between the front columns stood a multi-paned triangular window, nearly the width of the portico roof, situated above the second-story porch.

  “I wonder if that window belongs to a guest room,” said Henry, eying the entrance speculatively. “I might like to be given that room. And we must ask them what they’re serving tonight for dinner.”

  Rose smirked. “Probably the people who checked out yesterday.”

  Shade stood back in the cluster of suitcases, taking in the building with an appraising stare. Even when he was not holding his camera, he seemed to be mentally taking photos. “This place makes that hotel in Abingdon look deluxe, doesn’t it?”

  “We’re in the back of beyond, Shade. We’re lucky it isn’t a three-story wigwam. Let’s just hope the radiators work. This wind feels like an ice pick.”

  AFTER A HURRIED DINNER of country ham and boiled potatoes, Henry had declined the coffee and the inevitable after-dinner conversation that would accompany it. Saying that he intended to make an early night of it, he retired to his room. He was pleased with his accommodations. By slipping a dollar to the room clerk, he had requested and received the spacious third-floor guest room that did indeed contain the big triangular window under the eaves of the portico. Its furnishings were simple and clean, if not luxurious, but the space was gracefully cavernous, and he quite liked its architectural proportions. The slanted ceiling, which followed the lines of the pitched roof, and the white plaster walls trimmed with oak reminded him of rooms he had seen in castles in France.

  Add a few tapestries and Tudor furniture, he thought, and you could stage Hamlet in here. It would suit his mood: a hint of a ghost stirring up the madness within.

  The front wall of the long room was taken up with the great window, whose many square translucent panes afforded him no view of the town beyond, but it did allow the light in, making the room spacious and airy. A low oak cabinet built in below the window provided seating or a place to put his paperwork. The bed stood across from a brick fireplace that provided additional warmth and an air of quaint domesticity, making Henry feel oddly comforted. He had dragged the round side table and the straight chair close to the fireplace, but he had told the hotel servant that he did not want the fire to be lit. The radiator built into the window seat would provide warmth enough. There must be no flames.

  He supposed that in the spirit of chivalry, he should have given this room to Rose, but he had been shaken by the incident with the little girl in Pound, and he felt entitled to whatever solace he could find. Besides, Rose always declared that the only way to succeed as a journalist was to insist on being treated like one of the boys, so he decided that this one time he would take her at her word. Besides, she had expressed a preference for a first-floor room, so that she wouldn’t have to tackle the stairs several times a day.

  On the floor directly below Henry’s room was a guest parlor with doors leading out to the upstairs porch. Shade had found the lounge in his hasty reconnoitering of the premises, and at dinner they decided that it would do for their talks about the trial. If any morbidly genteel guests tried to stay there when they needed the room, they would resort to their usual gambit: telling gory and shocking tales about past news stories until the interlopers were driven away.

  Henry supposed that Rose and Shade were probably there now, discussing the case and the events of the afternoon, but tonight he was in no mood for fellowship or for work. He was brooding about the strange incident in Pound. How could that little girl have known what she did? She knew nothing about his past, yet she had pointed to a little Oriental girl that only she could see, and described her so well that he knew who it was. It was obvious that the mountain child did not understand what she envisioned. She had described the kimono and geta as one who had never seen such apparel, and her drawling pronunciation of shugorei left no doubt that she was repeating an unfamiliar word.

  But he knew that word well enough. He just did not think he would ever hear it applied in any way connected to himself. Henry stared at the dark and empty fireplace, seeing flames, and remembering the first time he had heard the term shugorei.

  HENRY

  He was a scholar, not a tourist, Henry told himself. He was not sight-seeing in Japan for its own sake, not as an idle traveler gawking at unfamiliar sights, but in order to broaden
his cultural knowledge, with a view to writing a whimsical but sophisticated volume of anecdotes about the folklore and customs of the country, and of his own experiences in observing it. He attended festivals, weddings, and funerals. He watched farmers and merchants and fishermen going about their daily tasks, and, most of all, he visited shrines. The strange and beautiful temples of the Orient fascinated him, and he visited so many of them that the earnest young college student who served as his interpreter one summer began to call him ohenro, which was a play on his given name, but it was particularly apt, because in Japanese the word means “pilgrimage.”

  On his visits to these holy places, Henry wore the white cotton jacket of the religious pilgrim, making sure to have it stamped in red by the officials at each shrine he visited, so that eventually the plain jacket was patterned with graceful red lines of kanji that looked to Henry like artwork. As he made these hallowed rounds, he would talk to the kannushi of each jinja, asking about the sacred being venerated by the shrine, and from there their conversation would often flow outward to more general philosophical topics.

  One afternoon on his travels in the countryside far from Tokyo, Henry and his interpreter Kenji had found a small hilltop jinja, set in a grove of pines overlooking the sea. A steep flight of worn stone steps led to the entrance of the shrine, and a red torii gate, much smaller and simpler than those of the grander shrines he had visited, marked the entrance to its courtyard. In a tranquil garden of stones and statues and manicured plants, the dark wooden structure of the shrine itself nestled among the pines with perfect symmetry.

  Kenji explained that the temple itself was not so ancient as the site of the shrine. Eight hundred years ago, a statue of a guardian spirit had been placed in a cave within the mountain. Centuries later the temple had been constructed around it. Kenji added that nearby there was a small but celebrated waterfall, where a famous samurai had once bathed in the aftermath of a battle.

  They were the only visitors that afternoon, and the pleasant old man who tended the shrine had offered them tea, and seemed glad for their company. He spoke no English, but with the aid of Kenji’s interpreting skills, they passed a pleasant hour, and the priest attempted to answer Henry’s questions, most of which centered on the traditions concerning death.

  After a few general comparisons between the beliefs of Christianity versus those of the traditional oriental faiths, Henry found himself telling the old priest about the death of his parents in the influenza epidemic. The old man nodded sympathetically. Many had died in Japan of this illness, as well. There had been great sorrow.

  When, through the interpreter, the priest suggested that Henry leave prayers for his parents, Henry shook his head. “I cannot seem to mourn them. They are so far away that the news of their death is not real to me. It is only words. I can’t feel it.”

  The old man nodded, “Perhaps then they are not entirely gone from you.”

  “I know that you do not regard the dead as we do,” said Henry. “I have seen the little shrines people make for the ancestors in their homes.”

  Kenji translated this observation, and the priest spoke at length about the custom of bon odori, the summer festival when the dead are welcomed back into the world with fireworks and festivals and offerings of food at the family altar. After a few days, though, they must be sent away again, and to effect this, on the last night of the celebration the people put little paper boats bearing candles adrift on the streams or in the sea.

  “You must see it, Ohenro,” Kenji added. “It is sad and beautiful to see the procession of hundreds of shining boats sailing along in the darkness, carrying the souls of the dead away again.”

  The priest had heard Kenji say Bommatsuri, and he nodded and smiled, seeming to know what they were discussing. He spoke a few words to the interpreter, who said, “The festival is in a few weeks’ time. He says that perhaps you could make a boat for your parents.”

  “I would like to see it,” said Henry, “But, no, I cannot send my parents away—even if it is only symbolic.”

  When this was relayed in hasty Japanese, the old man looked up at Kenji and said, “Shugorei?”

  The priest drank his tea in placid silence, while the interpreter tried to explain this concept with gestures and a torrent of heavily accented English. “Shugorei is someone who is dead . . . You have the word ghost. It is something like this. Perhaps an ancestor, or a wise person from ancient times . . . This spirit stands always behind you, and keeps you from harm.”

  Henry searched his mind for a western counterpart to this idea. “A guardian angel?”

  The interpreter shook his head. “Not quite. Angels were always angels. Shugorei was once a person. They stay in this world to look after you.”

  “Why?” said Henry. “Who tells them to?”

  The interpreter relayed the question to the kannushi, but the old man simply smiled and shrugged.

  “Well, do you suppose I have one?” asked Henry.

  He had not needed the translator to understand the reply. The priest had stared at him for a few seconds, or rather at a spot just over Henry’s left shoulder. Then he said in Japanese, but slowly, so that Henry could understand his words: “I do not see one.”

  AT THE LITTLE OAK TABLE before the dark fireplace, Henry was tired but not sleepy. Tomorrow morning the trial would begin, so he must be sure to wake up before the hour of the dragon. It would be a long day, and probably a tedious one. In his experience, trials usually were. They were as ritualistic as tea ceremonies, but considerably lacking in elegance.

  Wrapped in his black juban of tsumugi silk, Henry sat hunched over his notepad, staring at a half full tumbler of the clear mountain whiskey he had brought with him from Abingdon, in case this remote hamlet should turn out to be a “dry” county. Henry could endure much in the way of bad food, but he drew the line at abstaining from tea and alcohol. The taste of the Abingdon brew made his stomach burn—or perhaps it had been the salty ham that unsettled his digestion. Perhaps he should have had tea instead.

  The case.

  It was no use putting it off any longer, and, thanks to that mountain child in Pound, his reverie about his youth in Japan had ceased for now to be a comforting memory.

  Sugar eye, the child had said.

  She would probably never hear another word of Japanese as long as she lived, but she had done a creditable job of pronouncing that one. Perhaps the old priest at the jinja had not seen a shugorei behind him all those years ago, but the little Virginia mountain girl had seen it, describing the vision so well that he recognized it. Ishi. He did not want to remember Ishi, because then the dreams would come, and they always ended the same way: with the world in flames.

  To the job at hand, then.

  His editor would expect a telegram tomorrow, sent in time to run a story in the next day’s morning edition. Henry needed to think about ways to frame this trial into the classic Jernigan style of high tragedy. He had learned nothing today, though. He saw the little town, and met that strange reticent child who saw too much, but he had found no fresh way of looking at the sordid little story of a dead father and his beautiful prison-pent daughter. Seeing the town had provided him with the background imagery, but he could have spun that out of whole cloth without ever having set foot in the place.

  He uncapped his gold-nibbed fountain pen, and read over his notes in the leather-bound journal in which he roughed out the preliminaries of his stories. Consider the beautiful defendant, Erma Morton. Who was Erma, what was she?

  He searched for a literary parallel. Not Juliet. Not Desdemona. There was no lover in the offing. Not a victim. A murderer, or at least accused of being one. But not Medea, not Clytemnestra, killers of children and spouse respectively. Lady Macbeth? No, this was no political assassination, nor was it done for gain.

  Erma Morton did not kill the deceased—at least, not the way Henry intended to fashion the tale—and strict accuracy meant as little to Henry Jernigan as it had to Shakespeare and Homer.
The story was all, and mere facts must not be allowed to mar its literary symmetry.

  For a moment, his thoughts flickered back to his beloved Japanese folk tales, but it was no use thinking up some oriental parallel of imprisoned innocence. He must find a similar story in Western literature, something his newspaper’s readers would recognize without having to be given the entire story. An innocent wrongly accused . . . He closed his eyes, trying to concentrate through the beginnings of a headache. He could not think of any woman in classical antiquity who had been mistakenly charged with a crime.

  Saints? Certainly there were Christian martyrs aplenty to choose from—blameless women who had perished because of unjust laws. For inspiration Henry pictured medieval paintings—St. Catherine on her wheel . . . poor sightless St. Lucy, with her torn-out eyes resting on a platter . . . the martyred St. Cecilia . . . But they had been accused of nothing worse than piety. Even for a pen as skillful as his, it would be a stretch to liken a possible murderess to a blameless saint.

  The Salem witch trials? He took another swallow of whiskey. He had mentioned them in his dispatch from Abingdon, hadn’t he? Now, that might be just the image he was after. Ignorant and superstitious villagers ascribing deviltry to their innocent neighbors, and executing them for it. A witch hunt. Yes, that might serve very well, because everybody knew about the Salem witch trials, and everybody knew that the poor wretches accused of sorcery had been innocent. He could make his point in a well-chosen simile, rather than having to analyze the evidence and belabor the subtle points of the legal argument. Yes, he would continue with the theme that this trial was a witch hunt, and from that moment on, the presumption of innocence was assured.

  CARL JENNINGS, whose expense account did not allow him to be a guest of the Inn at Wise, was now ensconced on a cot in Cousin Araby’s stillroom, just off the kitchen. Although he had met her at various family gatherings, this was his first visit to her large Edwardian home in Wise. She was a tall, sharp-featured woman, the age of his parents, and when he first arrived he made the mistake of calling her “Aunt Araby.”