Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(58)

The girl went pale, but her mouth was fixed in a firm, straight line. “How’d you know?”

“It was all the gossip at the police station. I still have a few friends there, at least until Tom Shirley figures out who they are and sends them packing.”

The bailiff accepted one of those damnable “TA” buttons, and so did the man he escorted—a smallish fellow, wiry and faintly sinister. He was wearing a suit that didn’t fit him very well, and the way his hair oil struggled against the salt-and-pepper fluff suggested he didn’t often keep it so tidily coiffed.

Call it prejudice if you will, but he looked like the kind of man who’d beat his wife and shoot a priest. Which is to say, I loathed him on sight even more than I’d loathed him before looking at him. I might’ve loathed him even if I hadn’t known who he was, or what he’d done—there’s a certain stink on a certain kind of soul, a foul scent of hateful smallness too often thwarted . . . then given an ounce of power. There must be a word for it, but I’ll confess to not having one immediately on hand.

He had a false smile plastered across that craggy, tiny-eyed face, but it turned to an ugly glower when he spied his daughter standing beside me. The hateful little gnome didn’t even put the scowl away when Reverend Davis strolled up to shake his hand, though he bowed and scraped sufficiently to demonstrate that his displeasure was surely not aimed at the clergy.

I do not think it was my imagination that the room became quiet.

True, some of the crowd had already dispersed for other places—back into the courtroom, or to other appointments elsewhere; but plenty of men remained, and now that I looked around, every last one of them was wearing one of those stupid buttons.

It felt childish to me, this need to wear your team’s colors. It felt like showing off, or more precisely, a deliberate and ham-fisted attempt to intimidate our little band of sane folks in this wretched sea of madness. I, for one, was not intimidated. Neither was Lizbeth, who took it all in almost dispassionately. I’m confident she was thinking along the same lines as I was.

But George and the old chief felt the need to respond, for whatever reason. They closed ranks, Eagan taking hold of Ruth’s elbow as if to direct her gently to her seat in a theater—and George folding his arms, planting his feet in front of her, staring down the reverend and murderer.

In all fairness, this is their troubled city, not ours. They know the stakes and the players better than we do; perhaps we should take our cues from these good souls who struggle against the tide . . . but it’s as Lizbeth said: We’ve tangled with worse, or just as bad.

And we are still standing.





Lizbeth Andrew (Borden)




SEPTEMBER 29, 1921


We all filed back into the courtroom, and they put poor Ruth back upon the witness stand. My heart went out to her, it really did. I remember it all too well myself—even after all these years. Was Ruth on trial? Technically, no. But any fool could see she was being tried all the same.

She sat up straight and said her piece, again and again, even as that lawyer did his best to trip her up . . . and her own representative (of sorts) did very little to intervene. I don’t know if he was merely a bad lawyer, or if he actively sought to undermine her appearance on the stand. Either way, the result was the same: The girl was effectively on her own up there.

No, not the girl. The woman.

She certainly carried herself like a woman, despite the nearly uniform opposition to her stalwart presence. She’s twenty-one, I think—or thereabouts. Someone mentioned it to me at some point, perhaps it was Wolf. He whispered a great many things into my ear as the dull, infuriating drama unfolded. We were in the back row, and discreet enough that no one hushed us, or asked us to leave.

This is what I learned.

Hugo Black is the defense attorney for Edwin Stephenson, who in broad daylight assassinated the priest James Coyle. Black is somewhat notorious for his activity with the True Americans, a group that scarcely distinguishes itself from the Ku Klux Klan—except that it opposes a broader variety of people, and perhaps it dislikes them more deeply. If there’s one positive thing that must be said about the group, it does seem to be relatively local. You don’t really hear about it outside Birmingham, so there’s one small blessing to be tallied.

Mr. Black is very likely in the pocket of the Reverend Davis, a man who operates a “church” out at Chapelwood. Edwin Stephenson has also attended this church, and there you see the connection between his costly defense and the house of worship. All three are likewise intimately bound to the True Americans; indeed, the overlap might as well be one hundred percent, from where I’m sitting—in this veritable ocean of revolting little buttons with their awful little initials stamped thereupon.

Henry Mayhew is the prosecuting attorney, in title if not much in action. He’s doing his duty as an officer of the court, by which I mean to say that he’s shown up to present the case against Edwin Stephenson. His enthusiasm for the proceedings is difficult to gauge. He’s a slow-talking sort, and he’s from out of town. He may or may not be affiliated with the True Americans or the Chapelwood church, but he certainly isn’t a firebrand for justice in this matter.

The presiding judge is Harold Holt, about whom precious little is known. He was appointed by the new City Commission president, Nathaniel Barrett—the man who defeated George Ward, who sat at the end of our bench. I’ve only just met Mr. Ward, but he strikes me as a sturdy, intelligent man who did his best to defend and protect the citizens of this city regardless of their race or religion. Sadly, that didn’t work out so well for him—or for Martin Eagan, the former chief of police (who also stands with Ruth, or rather sat in the audience to support her).