Van Gogh greeted her at the door, happy to see his mistress. She'd resented it when he'd switched allegiances and left her for Ash, only showing up at the kitchen now and then for a free handout. But now—now she resented nothing Ash had ever done. She only regretted what he hadn't done.
The papers were where they'd been left when Moss had gone home and left them alone. Hugging herself, she smiled at the memory. Maybe she shouldn't have stopped him. Maybe they should have made love to each other the whole night long and maybe he should have left his seed inside her to grow.
And then she realized he had planted something inside her after all—in her heart, where her love for him grew every day. And which she knew would stay there until she took it to her grave with her, and even after that.
Beside the papers was a box with a ribbon tied hastily around it. Perhaps it wasn't even meant for her, she warned herself, lifting the box and shaking it gently. "What do you think, Van Gogh?" she asked the rabbit, who was nuzzling her ankles. "Should I open it?"
The last few days had held only sadness for her, and she fondled the box as if its contents were somehow magical and would turn her world around. Her hopes built so quickly and so out of proportion to what could possibly be in the box that she was tempted to put it down and leave it, unable to face another disappointment in her life.
"Go ahead and open it," a deep voice said, and she spun around to find Moss standing in the doorway, Liberty on his shoulder. "It weren't a easy thing to find. But he was determined. The man's a determined man, all right."
"Then it is for me?" she asked, pulling the sash at her waist a bit tighter and making sure she was covered up properly.
"Everything be for you, Miz Whittier," Moss said. "The sun, the moon—the way he tell it, they all for you. But that"—he pointed to the box on the table—"that be especially for you alone."
"He's in big trouble, Moss," she said, fingering the ribbon and watching the bow fall away. "And I don't know how to help him."
"It'll come, ma'am," he said softly. "Some things, it seem there ain't no hope for 'em, and then a miracle happens."
"I don't think we can wait for a miracle," Charlotte said, tears beginning to clog her throat.
"You don't just wait on a miracle, ma'am," he said softly, coming closer and pulling the cover from the box. "Sometimes you gotta help it along."
Charlotte stared down into the box, confused at first. Blinded by tears she thought she saw her mother's teacup nestled in some paper. Her finger traced the rim, smooth as the finest silk against her skin. As carefully as she'd ever lifted her baby birds, her newborn rabbits, her china figurines, she pulled the cup from its surroundings and held it in shaking hands.
Her mother's cup.
Moss was right. Sometimes when there was no hope, a miracle happened.
"You go ahead and have a cry," Moss whispered. "Then we gots lots of work to do before you get on to the court."
***
Well, they always said bad news traveled fast, but Ash had never expected to be living proof of it. There didn't seem to be a man in Oakland who hadn't heard about the fires or wasn't familiar with the defendant's reputation, as Cabot called it. Ash wished he'd had half the fun that was attributed to him.
His thoughts drifted to Charlotte, as they always did. His worst sins were in his mind, desires that, if a jury knew, would no doubt send him from the gallows to the bottom of the bay.
"And are you familiar with the defendant?" his brother asked yet another man in the jury box.
"Not as familiar as Tess the Whiting," he said, causing chuckles and guffaws around him that egged the man on. "Or Slant-eyed Annie. Or—"
"Thank you," Cabot said, cutting him off. "You seem rather well acquainted with these women yourself. Might make it hard for you to serve as an unbiased juror, don't you agree? I ask that juror twenty-four be excused for cause."
Brent stood, raising a hand to slow down the proceedings. "You ever see these women you mentioned yourself?" he asked the man in the box, who got a bit red faced and blinked in response. "Socially, that is?"
"I ain't on trial," the man said, crossing his arms over his chest.
"Ah, but if you were, you surely wouldn't want someone holding it against you that every now and then—not too often, of course—you might have taken a stroll down the wrong street and been tempted to exchange pleasantries with a pretty young woman intent on keeping the cold away, now, would you?"
"Your Honor!" Cabot groaned. "What Mr. Brent portrays as an act of charity now will no doubt be a heinous sin when it becomes my client who might have once, on some isolated occasion, helped fight the chill of a January evening. I again request the juror be excluded."
"Would you hold it against him?" Brent asked the prospective juror, ignoring Cabot completely. "Or might you even have a little sympathy for a lonely bachelor with no obligations to hold him elsewhere?"
"Your Honor," Cabot again called out, "the district attorney is tainting the entire jury pool. He begs for a mistrial before we've even—"
Judge Hammerman looked at Cabot hopelessly over his half-rims, shrugged as if it were suddenly beyond his powers, and addressed the juror. "You can answer the district attorney's question. Would you hold the fact that the defendant is of questionable moral character against him?"
Cabot threw up both hands as if to ask God Himself what was happening in his courtroom. "Your Honor!" he said, disgust dripping from his words. "Might I approach the bench?"
"You may," Hammerman said, popping the remnants of the lunch he'd been eating since noon into his mouth and talking around it, "but it won't do you a bit of good. I've seen Brent's case, Mr. Whittier. Let's just move on and get it over with. My wife's hoping I'll take her to her sister's in Sacramento for Easter."
Apparently things hadn't been going badly enough. Now Cabot had managed to lose favor with the judge.
"We can at least take heart that Mrs. Whittier won't be here for the details. I don't know how many times I've told that woman she doesn't belong in this courtroom. That a normal woman's sensibilities prohibit—well, we took care of that, anyway. Juror accepted." He raised his gavel and then hesitated. "Unless you want a preemptory—but if it were my brother's head on the block, this isn't the one I'd toss back in the ocean. He's apparently been on the hook once or twice himself."
Ash rested his forehead in his hand. For the better part of his life he'd had all the time in the world and nothing worth doing. Now he had everything to live for, and the real possibility that there'd be no time to do it.
***
Well, between her case and Cabot's they had filled the courthouse to capacity. Even the courthouse steps were crammed with reporters from the various papers and wire services. They were calling it a double-ender, like those boats that were the same at bow and stern, claiming there was a Whittier at either end of the courthouse.
She couldn't imagine what the street cleaners were charging the city of Oakland to keep the place from looking like a shanty town. Papers littered the lawns around the courthouse. Vendors circled the block selling fresh-baked cookies and washed fruit. A man on the corner shouted verses from the Bible and warned that the wrath of God would be visited upon the earth and to watch for signs of pestilence. With the fruit attracting the flies and the orator threatening plagues, Charlotte thought the end of the world seemed just a courtroom away.
She pushed her way out the courtroom door, grateful that the arguments were over for the day and she'd have time to regroup. Cabot had asked for no help on Ash's case and offered her no pointers on Virginia's. Kathryn said she felt like a messenger sent behind enemy lines wherever she went and whenever she spoke to either of them.
Outside the courtroom, the buzz of the crowd pressed against her until she couldn't make out what anyone was saying. There were some words of praise, she thought, from someone standing too close to her. Others called from farther back for her to be banned from the courthouse along with her client.
&nbs
p; "This way," a man said, and grabbed at her just as an egg went sailing past her ear. He yanked on her arm with authority. "I said come this way!"
"I don't care what you said," Charlotte answered, trying to shake him off. "Let go! I'm not—" A tomato hit the wall inches from her.
"Your carriage is waiting out back," he said, turning so that she could get a look at his face. Cabot's private investigator, and apparently he had no patience for the likes of her. "Come on!"
"But I wanted to—" she said, pointing to the courtroom in which her husband was picking twelve men to decide whether Ash would ever hold her again. She doubted that would be exactly the way Cabot might have described the point of the jury selection. Doubted, but didn't rule it out entirely.
"He's already been returned to his cell, Mrs. Whittier," the man said, sending a chill down her spine. Was she so obvious that a stranger knew where her heart was headed? Or did he just mean that court was over for the day? "And your husband's waiting in the coach."
"Let go of my arm," she said, yanking her elbow from his grasp. Something hard thudded against her shoulder, catching the bone and sending an unpleasant tingling down her arm. Yellow slime ran down her brown jacket in a slow rush toward her skirts. If an egg was hard enough to hurt, and it was, why then did it break so easily?
"Oh, he's going to love that," the man said, rubbing against her chest with his sleeve in an attempt to get rid of the evidence. He pushed her against the wall and shielded her as several apples splattered and splintered around them, then shoved her out the back door in front of him, nearly dragging her to the carriage. Arthur helped her up and around Cabot, who pressed her to his far side, ail but hiding her with his bulk.
Cabot gave the man a quick nod while Arthur climbed in and shut the door behind him, "Let's go!" he yelled up to the driver, and Charlotte was thrown back against the seat as the horse took off like his tail was on fire.
When they'd cleared the courthouse area and the businesses around them changed to grander and grander estates, Charlotte began to breathe again. Allowing her gaze to meet Cabot's, she found him staring at her with tired, sad eyes. Still, when he sensed her studying him as well, he smiled softly.
"And how was your day?" he asked, reaching into his breast pocket and taking a quick dose of his least favorite bitters. "Things went well for you, too, I trust?"
CHAPTER 24
Jury selection took two long days. Days in which Ash, like a dying man, saw his life flashing before him. References were made to his penchant for wine, women, and song, or more accurately Scotch, whores, and bird calls. His business pursuits were bandied about; the fact that he had no real home was noted. While Cabot fought to keep his prior run-ins with the law from the jury, Brent managed to ask potential jurors enough questions about brawls and knives to more than pique their interests and suspicions.
Another full day was spent on what Cabot called opening arguments. Ash dubbed them eulogies, and much preferred Cabot's to Brent's, though the man the district attorney described was far more interesting (and an awful lot closer to Ash) than the paragon of virtue (who read stories to his mother and mended wounded animals) Cabot's client was portrayed to be.
The meat of the trial started on Friday, with the prosecution's case. By lunch even Ash was convinced he'd set two fires and killed four people, one of whom he regularly had dinner with.
"I know it looks bad," Cabot told him as they shared a lunch from home in a small locked room in the courthouse. "But you are not to worry. The advantage is ours."
Ash played with the food on his plate, pushing it around without eating it. "How do you figure?" he asked.
"Law is a game, not unlike baseball or soccer. Just as in sport the right combination has been worked out to give one team the advantage. In baseball the home team has last licks. Just so, the defense has last licks in the law."
"It seems to me I haven't even gotten to bat yet, and I'm already out of the game," Ash said.
"Not necessarily," Cabot said. "It just seems that way because the prosecution gets to go first and lay out its entire case. The jurors believe most of what they are told and are ready to hang you." He paused, waved his fork in the air as if to erase the words, and then continued. "Metaphorically speaking, of course. Then we get to present our side of the case. We refute all their claims and show the jurors how you couldn't possibly have committed the crimes, how someone else could have, and they then believe us. Well, the prosecution's shot its wad, so to speak, and can only bring up issues they've already discussed. We get to rebut those, and then they close first, leaving us to convince the jury in the end and win the case." He dusted off his hands and tossed his napkin over his plate.
"And all we need to hit is a six-run homer," Ash said. "Great. Too bad that's impossible."
"There are very few things I've found impossible," Cabot said. Both of them stared at his inert legs.
"Can you prove I didn't commit these crimes, that I didn't kill Selma, for God's sake, and get me out of here so I can find who did?"
Cabot sucked at the comers of his mustache. "Working on it," he said.
"Can we offer them someone else? Greenbough? Some customer? You know Moss and I—"
Cabot nodded. "Charlotte's working on it. She's got Sam nailed to the wall, and enough other innuendoes to confuse the jury even if we can't quite convince them. She should wind up the last of the arguments on that damn Halton case today, and she'll devote the weekend to it."
"Don't put it all on her shoulders, Cab," he said. "If— hell—when I go down, I don't want her feeling she helped dig the hole."
"Worried about her feeling guilty?" Cabot asked. He was digging through papers in his briefcase and didn't look at Ash.
"She has nothing to feel guilty about," Ash said. He could still see the moon shining on her skin as she lay waiting for him, her wide frightened eyes intent on trusting him even while she'd bitten nervously at the corner of her lip.
"She'd like to come to your trial when her case is over," Cabot said. He fished out a small envelope and held it in his hand.
"No."
"I can't bar her from the courthouse," Cabot said. He seemed genuinely sorry that he could not. "I've even agreed to her taking the boy's appeal...."
"You think she won't win it?"
"It's a risk I don't really want to take. If I didn't believe I could buy the father off if we lose, I wouldn't even consider it."
Ash felt his jaw fall. "You think you can buy Davis?"
"You'd be amazed what you can buy if you have to," Cabot said. "And last resorts are always a risky business."
"So you think you can buy a kid," Ash said. His brother's moral code struck him as very bizarre. After all the years of looking up to him, all the years of comparing himself and falling short, Ash was finally beginning to see the true Cabot Whittier. And the more he saw, the less he admired. And the less he admired, the more he seemed to find sympathy for. Perhaps after all the years of thinking otherwise, he was learning that his brother was simply a man.
"Would you prefer Charlotte in your courtroom or down the hall?" he asked. "I can't lock her in her room, Ashford."
"What if she loses?"
"I'll take care of it," Cabot said. "I've been taking care of her since her grandmother died, and before that as well. And I'll keep taking care of her."
"Promise me this," Ash said softly, "—that won't change if we lose this thing."
"Win or lose," Cabot agreed with a nod, "nothing will change."
***
It was in the judge's hands now, and while Charlotte wasn't sure she'd won, she was sure she'd put forth the best argument that could have been made for the case. By anyone. And that felt good.
Good, too, was the fact that Moss Johnson was waiting for her at the back of the courtroom, ready to escort her next door. If she couldn't help defend him, she could at least show herself in Ash's corner. And there was a good chance that their case would have broken for lunch and she would be abl
e to at least see Ash and thank him for the teacup. Tell him how much it meant to her in person rather than settling for the little note she'd had to write so carefully, lest anyone get hold of it.
"I think you done real good," Moss said when she'd gathered up her belongings and found him at the back of the room. "Real good."
There was something about the way he said it, some underlying something that made it sound like compensation. "What's wrong?" she asked.
"And you is smart too," he said. "No question about it."
"What is it, Moss?" she demanded. She didn't need compliments, she needed facts to deal with, and overcome somehow.
"Mr. Greenbough," Moss said, grimacing. "He done broke his leg."
Charlotte shrugged. It was too bad he hadn't broken his head. And she knew Moss felt the same way. So then... "When?" she asked, realizing the significance.
Moss nodded with his whole body. "Week and a half ago. Hasn't been outta bed since."
"So I can prove he was cheating Ash blind, and it won't do us a bit of good. There's no way he could have set the second fire. Is that what you're saying?"
Moss continued that same nodding of his body that she'd seen the men do at Selma's shivah. It was as if he were already mourning for Ash. She put a hand on his arm and steadied him.
"Then we have to find someone else," she said firmly. "I know we're missing something here, Moss. And it's so obvious that we just don't see it."
"Yes, ma'am," Moss agreed, but without any conviction at all.
"We just have to widen your list," she said, pulling a hankie from her skirt pocket and dropping out the card she'd prevented Eli from seeing at the hospital. The one she suspected was from Ewing Flannigan.
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