Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(66)



“Don’t get your hopes up, Inspector.”

My hopes weren’t up at all, and they were sinking by the second. “We’re on our way, as soon as I can summon a car.” I hung up, and said to Lizbeth, “The jury’s coming back in. They’ve reached a verdict.”

“Since when?” she demanded. “They only had yesterday afternoon, and . . . and . . .” She glanced at a clock on the wall. “The past hour, perhaps? Oh dear, oh no. That can’t be good.”

“We don’t know anything for certain, not yet.”

“Yes, we do, and false hope won’t help anything—we both know that.”

“False hope, false justice, false sense of security,” I muttered as I dialed for the car service that had worked so well for me thus far. “James deserved better.”

“So does Ruth,” she said.

I was told the car would be around in twenty minutes, and it turned out the dispatcher was underselling their speed by fully four minutes. Not that either Lizbeth or I was complaining. We fidgeted outside on the front porch, waiting without speaking much. I think we were both anxious to get this over with, whatever it was.

We both knew that Edwin Stephenson was going to walk free. It was only a matter of time, a matter of forty-five minutes—once we were both seated in the sedan, and Lizbeth was holding on to her hat, lest the wind make off with it.

Maybe that was what spurred our sense of urgency: the thought that these were the last safe minutes Ruth was likely to have. Once her father was free, would he come for her next with his gun? Would he come for anyone else? I had no way of knowing how deep his resentment ran, or how likely he was to pursue vengeance. A normal fellow might take the break of having gotten away with murder, and consider himself blessed. Stephenson wasn’t a normal fellow, though. He was a Chapelwood fellow, and a True American, and probably a Klansman, if one delved deeply enough into his past activities. He was definitely a killer of priests and a beater of women, a charlatan of the clergy who preyed on starry-eyed young couples outside the courthouse. I knew absolutely nothing to recommend him.

We pulled up to that same courthouse where he’d performed his phony wedding ceremonies, and stepped onto the very same sidewalk where he’d presented himself as a man of God and a friend to marriage’s bureaucratic processes. We stepped across it quickly and went to the stairs; at the top, George Ward was waiting for us, with Ruth standing beside him as if she wished to hide behind him, or cling to him like a kitten—but had just enough dignity to restrain herself from all the silly things that outright terror might prompt her to do otherwise.

Lizbeth trotted up the steps, and I was close on her heels. She rushed to the girl and took her hands. “Everything will be fine,” she assured her, but it was too earnest and her eyes were too serious to convince anyone, even herself. “Everything will be just fine,” she repeated, then addressed George Ward. “We’re in time, aren’t we?”

“In time to hear that monster go free? You’ve got another ten minutes, at least.”

“What will happen?” Ruth asked. “Once they let him go?”

My heart nearly broke for her, but I couldn’t lie. “Not much, I expect. He’ll go home to your mother; you’ll go home to your husband. And Father Coyle will stay right where he is, but there’s nothing to be done about that.”

“It isn’t fair,” she whispered, her voice choked with tears. “They’re going to let him go, like he didn’t do anything at all.”

“That’s not set in stone, not yet,” Lizbeth argued determinedly. She released the young woman’s hands and gave her a quick, motherly hug. “We must have a little faith.”

George Ward said drolly, “Oh, I’ve got faith as far as the eye can see. Faith that they’ll cut the jackass loose with a pat on the back and a hearty handshake.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” she griped.

“I know. And I want to say, I appreciate the effort and the indignation . . . but around here, these days, all the good intentions in the world won’t amount to shit.”

We heard the call of a bailiff, so we rallied ourselves to head inside.

As we entered the foyer, I scanned the scene for some sign of Chief Eagan, but spotted none. When I asked after him, George said he’d tried to reach him, but it was such short notice that he’d failed to do so. The chief didn’t have a telephone, he told me. George had sent a messenger after him, and that was all he could do.

Everyone filed into the courtroom, and again, we took up our positions at the rear of the chamber. It was only then that I spied Edwin Stephenson, looking smug and impatient beside Hugo Black. Reverend Davis was there, too—right behind the defense, seated on the front row as if it were his rightful due. Maybe it was. He was the man who bought and paid for the verdict, wasn’t he?

Or was it the True Americans? I don’t know—the money trail became so convoluted the closer you looked. Come to think of it, even at a distance it really just appeared to be one big pot of money, shared among bigots and fools, doled out to bolster their terrible causes.

At any rate, he was instrumental in the proceedings, and his position behind the defendant all but announced as much.

I realized, as I sat back there—staring across the room at the back of the reverend’s head—that I was doing it too: I was assuming that James’s killer would go free, like it was a given. But I’d tried to be positive, hadn’t I? I’d tried to assume the best, and not conclude that this small-city, backwater judicial system could be so useless and corrupt?

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