Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(53)

All I found was a witness stand. I don’t know why they call it that, since you sit down once you get there.

Mr. Henry Mayhew was waiting for me to get myself situated. I raised my hand when the bailiff brought the Bible and I said my name for the record, and all that nonsense, then fiddled with my sweater and shuffled my feet around—but as soon as I realized I was doing that, I forced myself to stop. I couldn’t sit up there and fidget like a little girl. I had to hold my head straight like a woman.

Mr. Mayhew, in his voice as slow as molasses, asked me if I knew you, and I know it was just for the record but that was real dumb, because everyone knew I knew you. I spent the first few minutes on that stand answering a whole bunch of questions like that—easy ones, and maybe that was Mr. Mayhew being kind and letting me warm up. Mr. Black didn’t object to any of the questions or anything I said, but then again, I was only saying facts.

Then he got around to the day you died, and I hadn’t been there when it happened, so I couldn’t say much about Daddy killing him.

“But you’d seen him earlier that day?”

“Yes,” I said. “First thing that morning, I went out to Saint Paul’s and Father Coyle married me and Pedro.”

Over in the jury box, the sour-faced old men were shaking their heads and clicking their tongues. Oh, well. I already knew what they thought of me before I climbed up into the box in the first place. I wouldn’t give a damn, except their opinion mattered. Just this once. And it mattered big—but God, I wished it didn’t.

“Was your father aware of your betrothal?”

“No.”

“You didn’t tell him?”

I shook my head. “No. He didn’t want me to get married, and he didn’t like Pedro.”

“Why is that?”

“Pedro’s a good bit older than me, and he’s Puerto Rican, and he’s a day laborer . . . take your pick. That’s probably what he’ll tell you. But the real truth is, he just didn’t want me out of his house, because then he couldn’t tell me what to do anymore.”

“Objection,” called Hugo Black from his seat at the defense’s table. He said it like this was all very dull, and a total waste of his time. “Calls for speculation.”

“Withdrawn,” Mr. Mayhew said obligingly. “But you are a grown woman, over the age of sixteen, and able to marry as you like.”

“Damn straight I am.”

“Language, Mrs. Gussman.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled. I felt my face getting hot again, but I took a deep breath and kept my head up. “But it was none of my daddy’s business who I married. Like you said, I’m a grown woman. And we didn’t have a wedding, so he wasn’t paying for anything—and he didn’t get any say in it.”

I was real glad he wasn’t in the courtroom just then. He’d taken a fall in his cell, that’s what I heard through Chief Eagan. They had him under a doctor’s care, but it didn’t sound like he was too bad off. I wouldn’t have been worried about him even if they’d said he was beat up something awful. I was glad he was gone, and glad he wasn’t down there glaring at me while I talked.

But I couldn’t help looking at his empty chair every once in a while anyway.

The rest of it was pretty straightforward and Mr. Black didn’t object to anything else, and when Mr. Mayhew said he had no further questions for me, I wanted to die of relief. But then Hugo Black stood up for cross-examination and then I just wanted to die.

“Tell me, Mrs. Gussman,” he began, “how many times have you run away from your father’s home over the years?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Just answer the question, or I’ll treat you like a hostile witness.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t sound good. I had a feeling that he was going to treat me hard enough without it being called “hostile.” So I said, “Off the top of my head, I don’t know. Maybe five or six.”

“Five or six times,” he repeated, just for show—and not in case the jury hadn’t heard me. “You fled the home of the man who’d raised you, cared for you your whole life.”

“I fled the home of a man who beat me and my momma like a dog when it suited him.”

He gave me the ugliest smile I ever did see. “But the Good Book tells us to spare the rod and spoil the child, and you are truly spoiled enough. Every child who’s ever reprimanded finds the sentence too harsh.”

“The Good Book says a lot of things nobody listens to anymore, too.”

“Mrs. Gussman,” he said, pretending to be gentle but mostly being cruel. “This is not a conversation. You’ll answer the questions I ask, and leave any editorializing out of it. Do you know what ‘editorializing’ means?”

“Of course I do,” I snapped. Then I remembered how he wanted it phrased, so I said, “Yes. I know.”

“Good, good. So answer me this, if you please: How many times were you caught alone with boys after school?”

“Twice, and once it was my cousin Albert—and everybody knew damn good and well there was nothing going on.”

“Editorializing . . . ,” he warned me. “And language, too. I’ll let it slide, because I want to know about the other time.”