Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests (31 page)

My mama walked with her head up, looking straight ahead. This was the first I’d seen her since the day we rode into town in
the sheriff’s wagon. Her hair was nice, combed back and twisted up neat in the back. She wore clothes I had never seen, a
red shirtwaist trimmed in black and a black skirt. They wrote about it in the newspaper. That was one thing they got right.
Later I found out that Mr. Hackett, her lawyer, helped get those clothes for her.

We had to stand up when the judge came in. Even in his black robe, you could tell he was a heavy man. He didn’t have much
hair on his head, but his eyebrows were the thickest I’d ever seen.

Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Hackett made their speeches, but I hardly heard a word they said. I knew any minute they were going to
call me to put my hand on the Bible and swear to tell the truth. My mama and I never went to church much after she married
Mr. Davis, but still I wondered what happened to people who swore on the Bible and then told a lie.

When the speeches were done, the other witnesses were made to leave the courtroom. Mr. Sullivan asked that I be allowed to
stay since I would be the first to testify, and the judge agreed.

When I heard my name, I was trembling so hard I thought my legs wouldn’t carry me to the front of the courtroom. My hand shook
when I put it on the Bible. I looked to where my mama was sitting, then quick looked away.

Mr. Sullivan’s questions were easy at first. Was my name Lucy Ann Simpson and was I Margaret Davis’s daughter and was I acquainted
with George Davis? I just had to say yes, sir, but even so the judge kept telling me to speak up.

Then Mr. Sullivan asked me about the shooting, about how I heard shouting from the other room and ran in and saw Mr. Davis
waving the revolver around. He asked about Mr. Davis and my mama fighting for the revolver and about how I was so scared I
couldn’t be certain whether it went off by accident or on purpose.

That was true, I said. I kept my eyes on my lap because I was afraid to look up and see my mama’s face.

“And when Mr. Davis lay dying on the floor, you saw the revolver in your mother’s hands?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. By this time truth and lies were so mixed up in my head, I hardly knew one from the other. But I do know
I never said those things they put in the newspaper, that my mama’s eyes were blazing like a cat’s and that she pulled the
trigger again and again. Ever since my mama’s trial, I don’t believe a word I read in the newspaper. If they say the sun is
shining, I think to myself it must be raining.

Then Mr. Hackett, my mama’s lawyer, asked me questions. He was a tall man with a thick mustache that he kept stroking like
it was a furry animal.

“Do you like living in Mr. Myerhoff’s house?” he asked. “Are you treated more kindly than you were by Mr. Davis? Do they buy
you nice clothes? Would you choose to stay with the Myerhoffs as long as you could?” All I could answer was “Yes, sir.”

When the judge finally told me I could step down, I was crying. As I went back to my seat, my mama and I looked at each other
straight on for the first time. I expected to see pure hatred on her face, but it wasn’t like that. Whatever she was feeling
didn’t show at all.

Other people put their hands on the Bible and swore to tell the truth. I suppose some of them did. One man talked about the
blood in the cellar. With all my scrubbing that night, we didn’t think about the blood dripping down between the floorboards.
He talked for a long time, telling how he knew it was human blood and not from a pig or a cow. Another man went on about the
bones that were under the barn, how he knew without any doubt that they were human bones.

I was glad when they called up Mr. Ed Buckley. He was a farmer who had known my mama since she was a girl. I didn’t think
he would say anything to harm her, but that wasn’t how it turned out. He told how the sheriff asked him to come up to the
jail and visit with my mama even though he didn’t want to. He told how he and Mama just sat talking about one thing and another.

“She talked to you about killing George Davis, did she?” Mr. Sullivan asked.

Mr. Buckley said, “Well, she said something about red- dogging George Davis and I told her I could hardly blame her, the way
he treated her.” Then Mr. Buckley looked straight at the sheriff and said that if he’d known the reason for his visit was
to get evidence against my mama, he wouldn’t have gone in there.

____

O
N THE THIRD
or fourth day, I don’t remember for certain, Mr. Hackett called my mama up to testify. She was wearing a different dress
that day, a black calico with white trim. I suppose he got that for her too, because I had never seen it before. When Mr.
Hackett called her up, people got so noisy, commenting to each other, that the judge had to bang his gavel again and again.

Mr. Hackett asked my mama about the things Mr. Davis had done to her, the beatings and so forth, and how she was afraid for
her life. This was where I had put my hope. I thought that if the judge heard what kind of man George Davis was, he’d say
he deserved to die ten times over. But it didn’t happen that way. Mr. Sullivan and the judge wouldn’t let Mr. Hackett ask
my mama those questions. Those questions weren’t proper, they said.

Mr. Hackett argued with the judge, saying the questions were proper, that my mama feared for her life and that was why she
tried to get the revolver away from Mr. Davis. But the judge had another idea. He said it didn’t matter that my mama was afraid,
because she didn’t say she was trying to protect herself. She said the gun went off by accident. They went back and forth
on this. At first I didn’t understand what it all meant, but then I got the gist. The judge didn’t care about the things Mr.
Davis had done to my mama.

Then it was Mr. Sullivan’s turn. When he asked my mama how she came to shoot Mr. Davis, she stuck to her story about how he
waved the revolver around, threatening to shoot her, and when she tried to grab it, it went off. “He got shot purely by accident,”
she said.

Then Mr. Sullivan asked whether she had chopped off Mr. Davis’s head.

The courtroom was so quiet then you could have heard a leaf fall to the ground. Everyone was waiting for my mama’s answer.

She finally said, “I don’t see what difference it makes, once a man is dead.”

Mr. Sullivan asked his question two or three more times, and each time my mama gave him the same answer. By then there was
laughing in the courtroom, not out-loud laughing, but snickering and the like.

Then Mr. Sullivan said, “I expect you know what a man’s head is, Mrs. Davis.”

My mama said, “I expect so.”

“I will make my question very plain,” Mr. Sullivan said. “Did you pick up an ax and chop Mr. Davis’s head off?”

“Not when he was still living,” my mama said.

“Am I to understand that you chopped off his head when he was no longer living?”

“That was when I did it,” my mama said.

The judge had to bang his gavel then and tell the people that if the commotion didn’t stop he was going to throw the bunch
of them out of the courtroom.

After my mama stepped down, Mr. Hackett told the judge that he had a list of names, more than twenty, I think, of people who
were ready to speak up for my mama. Two of them were justices of the peace my mama had gone to at different times, swearing
an oath against Mr. Davis so they would put him in jail for beating her, but it never did work. The others were neighbors,
people from town who’d seen her with her eyes blackened and clumps of her hair torn out.

But the judge wouldn’t let Mr. Hackett call a single one of them up to speak. “Improper, improper,” he said again and again.
Listening to him, something changed in my heart. I stopped hating my mama. After all the beatings she had taken from Mr. Davis,
here she was taking a beating from the judge, this time with his words.

____

T
HE NEXT DAY
Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Hackett and the judge made long speeches. Then the jury went out to decide if my mama was guilty. I
knew what they would decide before they even came back. I guess everyone else did too. There was no hope for my mama, not
with the judge forbidding Mr. Hackett’s questions.

____

M
R
. M
YERHOFF TOOK
me over to the jail in his wagon so I could spend time with my mama before they sent her to the prison up in Auburn. I was
scared to see her, but I went anyway. When I walked in, the first thing she said was “Lucy Ann, you’ve gotten so fat I would
hardly know you.” Then I knew it would be all right, that she didn’t hate me.

I cried and told her I was sorry I hadn’t stuck to the story the way we planned. She said I wasn’t to worry about it, that
she knew what those people were like, how they twisted things around. Then she laughed and said she’d never had things so
easy in all her years with Mr. Davis as she did in that jail. I suppose she was scared about going to prison, but she didn’t
let me see it.

Then I spoke up and told what had been on my mind for some days. “I want to tell Mr. Sullivan the truth about that night,”
I said.

“And what would come of that?” My mama’s eyes were blazing then. “Nothing you say is going to make them set me free.” Then
she made me swear to her that I would never say a word to Mr. Sullivan.

I had to make another promise too. When I said that if I got money of my own, I would take the train up to Auburn and visit
her, she got all riled up. She didn’t want me to see her in that place, she said.

I asked if it was so terrible there, but she wouldn’t answer, just made me promise that I never would come. Then she said
she would be happy to have my letters, and I promised to write to her every month.

The woman who was a keeper at the jail had showed her how to do fancy stitching, and my mama wanted to teach me. That was
how we spent the rest of the morning, stitching on muslin, and talking just as if it was not the last time we would ever see
each other.

____

I
STAYED ON
working for Mrs. Myerhoff until I was sixteen. Then I got work at the hotel, where I met Samuel McCoy, the man I married.
I wrote to my mama every month, only missing one now and again. Sometimes she answered and sometimes she didn’t, depending
on if she was sick or if they punished her by not letting her write to me. She was a big, strong woman, but she became sickly
soon after she got to Auburn.

The last letter I had from her was when my oldest boy was six. I guess she had been at Auburn for nine years. I hardly recognized
her writing because her hand was so weak. She started by saying that she expected to die soon, but she wasn’t afraid. She
knew the next life would be better for her than this one.

She wanted me to know that two things in her life made her happy. The first was reading in my letters how well my family and
I were doing. “The other thing I am glad about,” she wrote, “is that I red-dogged George Davis, even if it was an accident.
You and I both know that man deserved to die.” Then she asked me to pray for her soul.

I remember looking out my back door with the letter in my hand, not knowing what to think. Here she was writing about that
night just as if she’d forgotten the truth of it, that I was the one who had my hand on the revolver when it went off. I wondered
if she was reminding me to stick to the story we had agreed on. But over the years I’ve come to see it differently. I think
she found comfort in believing that she’d pulled the trigger, that she’d put the bullet in George Davis’s throat.

BY BARBARA PARKER

P
ayday at Penniman, Wolfe & Mulloy. In the nanosecond they allow us for breaks I go to accounting to pick up my check. Rita
sits at her desk, smiling up at me. Ever since we had lunch together at the Cuban diner last week, she gets this look on her
face. She wants me to ask her out. Be nice to her. Something.

Rita says, “How’s your mother?” She leans on crossed arms, making cleavage. The buttons strain on her shirt. She is not slender.

I pocket the envelope. “Still recuperating. Thanks for asking.”

“So. Are you going back to school next month?”

“Probably not. Mom… you know.”

“Yeah. That’s too bad.”

“Law school can wait. I don’t mind. It’s only a year.”

Rita sighs. “Not many guys would be that decent.” As I turn to leave, she says, “Warren? Are you busy tonight?”

“Tonight? Why?”

“The Latin Fest is at Bayfront Park. You’re always working. You need to get out! Besides, it’s free.”

I can’t think of an excuse to say no… except for one, sitting in the apartment on Miami Beach. But it’s Friday. What the
hell. She’s capable of putting her own dinner in the microwave. “Okay. I’ll go with you.”

Rita actually claps her hands together, a gesture that says more than it should. “Great. You want to meet downstairs at five
thirty?”

“Well… let me call you. I have to finish something for Erika Mulloy. If it’s not on her desk this afternoon, she’ll slice
out my heart with her fingernails.” Erika’s nails are legendary, the subject of jokes.

Rita giggles. Her supervisor glances over from her computer screen.

Ha-ha, funny man, but I’ve just insulted a name partner, the head of our commercial litigation division. Worse: I’ve blown
off an entire five minutes. Erika Mulloy could cause me considerable pain, but I don’t think she would fire me. Technically,
I work for the managing partner, Louis Penniman. Erika snatched me to help out on a lawsuit involving shoddy construction
of a luxury hotel on the Beach. I am her document-review slave, going through mountains of paper, searching for any scrap
that bears on the issue at hand. Thrilling work.

On my way to the elevator I walk past the cubicles on the windowless side of the long, open corridor where the secretaries
sit. Most of them are young and pretty. They don’t look up. I am only Warren Kemble.

Rounding a corner, I hear jubilant laughter through the open door of Frank Delgado’s office. I slow to a stop. Frank is a
big rainmaker, head of our criminal department. He holds the firm record for most sexual harassment claims against him. He
is telling someone about the PR expert he hired in the Talbot murder case, and how they got the client’s parents on
Larry King Live
, and how Talbot was smart enough from day one not to open his mouth to the police. Just said, I’d like to talk to you, but
on advice of my counsel, can’t do it. Jesus Christ, if more of my clients would live by that rule—