Beach Wedding(22)

But my dad just sat there. Every time I glanced from the open jury door to him, he was still placid and poker-faced, still stoic and completely unruffled. When he spotted me looking at him, it was his turn to give me a wink and a warm, dimpled smile.

I looked over at Hailey, beautiful and dark and snooty. She was wearing a deep green sharply tailored wool dress the exact color of her eyes.

But when the jury finally piled in, I saw the snootiness disappear.

As the jurors found their seats, I watched as Jimmy took up position to the right of the jury box with another large younger court officer. It was a place neither of them had stood before.

They were there to immediately take Hailey into custody if she were found guilty, I realized.

I watched as Hailey suddenly noticed the officers as well. She didn’t actually swallow as she looked at them, but I saw her cut a longing glance back up the aisle at the courtroom door.

As the foreman finally stood, it was so quiet you could hear the nervous rattle of the paper he was holding.

Hailey bowed her head and went white like she was about to toss her cookies.

She wasn’t the only one, I thought, as I puffed out a huge breath, my hand gripping hard on the arm of the wood bench I was sitting on.

“Foreman?” the judge said.

The foreman of the jury was a very heavy pale white fiftysomething man with dyed black hair and big glasses. I’d forgotten his Polish name, but I did remember he was a civil engineer who worked for the town of Hempstead in Nassau County.

Engineers relied on logic, right? Reason? I thought. We had this, right?

“Foreman, has the jury reached a verdict?” the judge asked.

I, as well as everyone else in that room, held my breath as the foreman brought the paper up before his eyes. I was gripping the bench even harder now. So hard one of my knuckles suddenly cracked.

“No, Your Honor,” the heavy engineer finally said. “We have not.”

I slammed back into my seat as if I’d been shoved.

What?

I watched Judge Mathiassen cast a quick panicked look at the packed, now loudly murmuring courtroom.

“Foreman, as I instructed you yesterday, this case is of grave importance to the community. Can’t you deliberate some more?” he said.

“No, we cannot, Your Honor,” the foreman said, just as nervous. “Two of the members of the jury are not in agreement with the rest, and we just spoke about it, and the holdouts are adamant. They will not be moved.”

The white-haired judge looked very, very weary. He took off his reading glasses and rubbed at his eyes. He opened his mouth to say something. But then closed it again and lifted his gavel instead.

“Then I have no other option but to declare this proceeding a mistrial,” he said as the courtroom erupted.

No! I thought. Mistrial?

Wrong! Wrong! It was all wrong.

I looked for my dad, but there were too many people around him to see his face. I couldn’t imagine how bad he felt, how devastated.

I looked over at Hailey. She was ecstatic and beaming. Over the back of her lawyer Byron Seager’s bespoke suit, I could see her smiling with her eyes closed.

Truly, it was like she’d just won the World Series. Or an Academy Award, I thought, seething at the bull crap of it all. I couldn’t stop shaking my head in anger as her friends and family and even Noah’s family all hugged her as her lawyers patted her on the back.

I knew that a mistrial meant she could be tried again, but this was a blow. A hard one. After all that, my dad had lost. The damn thing had been open-and-shut. But they had stolen his evidence and lied and cheated about everything.

And they had beaten him. They had beaten my dad.

What bastards, I thought as my eyes suddenly filled with hot tears.

It stung all right. The worst thing possible had happened.

Or so I had thought.

But I was wrong.

It wasn’t the worst thing possible. Not by a country mile.

I didn’t know it then, but the worst thing possible was already on its way, coming at me and my family like a runaway train.



PART TWO

UNBURIED TREASURE




32

“Mommy! Why are we still here?” Angelina said, rubbing at her eyes as she woke from her nap. “My legs are hot, Mommy. And this isn’t the beach! Why are we still in the car?”

I sighed as I finally put the car in Drive and whipped a quick U-ey on Meadow away from the Sutton Glass House.

“Exactly, Mommy,” I said, shaking my head at my wife. “Why do you do these mean things?”

We went back to the house and parked and saw that some of the family were at the pool as we came across the park of grass along the side of the house. But as we had promised Angelina that we’d take her straight to the “lotion,” as she referred to it, we just waved to everyone as we found the teak stairs for the beach.

Angelina splashed in the swash for a bit, then begged for me to take her out into the waves. At least in the beginning. After the first one plastered into us and she got a pretty good taste of the seawater, she changed her mind.

“Yuck, Daddy! Take us back, take us back!”

Soothed from her ill-fated “lotion” adventure with a juice pack and a dry towel, Angelina was completely absorbed in full Bob the Builder mode with her pail and shovel beside our towel ten minutes later when my wife turned to me.