"From a pay phone at the Gas-N-Go on Third. So it couldn't be traced." Dent wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "He thought it was funny. He said it was easy, like fishing."

"Thank you." Elijah turned toward the bench. His heart was beating so hard he thought the judge must hear it. "Your Honor, I have no further questions for this witness."

* * *

Tolbert said nothing for a long, long time.

He had put down his pen. He sat with his hands folded on the bench, his shoulders slightly bowed, staring at no one. The gold seal of Georgia gleamed behind him, and beneath it, the old man in the black robe looked suddenly, strangely, like someone who had been handed a letter from his own past.

"Ms. Lindholm," he said at last. "Do you wish to cross-examine?"

Lindholm stood, shuffling her notes. For a moment, she seemed to consider the question as a real one. Then she squared herself and walked to the lectern.

"Mr. Dent," she said, in a brittle voice. "You and your cousin have a history, don't you? A disagreement over a truck?"

"We did."

"You are angry with him."

"I was. I'm not anymore."

"You're testifying for a family you've never met, against a family member who has defended this town for fourteen years."

"I'm testifying," said Dent, "because I couldn't sleep."

Lindholm paused. The room seemed to lean toward him.

"My daddy was a good man," Dent said. "Worked at the lumber mill until it closed. He taught me one thing. He said, 'Travis, you can lose a lot of things in this life, money, land, even family. But once you lose your word, you've lost it all.'" He shook his head slowly. "I gave my cousin my silence for three years. That's all I had to give. And I don't want to have it anymore."

Lindholm opened her mouth. She closed it. She looked at the notes in her hand, and then, very slowly, she set them down on the lectern.

"No further questions," she said.

Tolbert nodded. His voice, when he spoke, was thin as a thread. "The witness may step down."

Dent rose. He picked up his cap from the rail, and as he walked back toward the gallery, his boots scuffing on the old floor, the crowd shifted to let him through. No one clapped. No one spoke. But an old woman in the aisle reached out and touched his sleeve, just once, as he passed, and Dent stopped and bowed his head, his face working.

When he reached the back row, he sat down and stared at his hands.

Elijah turned and walked to the defense table. He was surprised to find that his legs were trembling.

Isaiah looked up at him with swimming eyes. "Eli," he whispered. "I don't even know what to say."

"You don't have to say anything," said Elijah.

"It's not over yet."

"No," Tolbert said from the bench, and his voice cut through the room like a blade. "It is not."

He lifted his gavel and tapped it once, lightly, the sound of a man about to make a hard decision.

"The court will take a ten-minute recess."

Chapter 16: Recess

Judge Tolbert called for ten minutes, but nobody really left.

A few people drifted into the hallway, and their eyes stayed locked on the open doors as if gravity itself held them there. Someone brought a paper cup of water to the old woman who had been crying in the back. Even the janitor, who usually mopped the corridor outside Courtroom Two around lunchtime, leaned on his broom in the doorway and let the cleaning wait.

Inside, the room had taken on the hush of a church between hymns.

Elijah sat alone at the defense table. Isaiah had been led to a side bench by two deputies, who let him sit with his hands cuffed in front of him and his shackled ankles stretched out on the floor. Elijah had watched him go. His brother had looked back over his shoulder twice, the way a child looks back at a mother on the first day of school.

Now Elijah squared the folders in front of him and slowly breathed out.

His hands, to his surprise, were steady. It was his knees that shook, in a fine, fast tremor beneath the table where no one could see. He pressed them together and waited for it to pass.

You're not done, he told himself. Don't celebrate. Don't relax. Don't even breathe too deeply, because the second you do, it all comes loose.

There was no lawyer hovering behind him. No team whispering in his ear. Only a stack of paper, a pen, a battered briefcase with a broken latch, and a ticking clock on a wall that had seen a hundred years of bad news.

He found, strangely, that he did not mind.

* * *

Across the aisle, Andrea Lindholm leaned toward Officer Haskins and spoke in a low, sharp whisper. He did not look at her. He stared straight ahead at the seal of Georgia like a man watching a train come down the tracks and discovering that his foot was caught.

Elijah could not hear what she said. But he did not need to. He saw it in the way her hand sliced the air, in the way she pointed once at the folder in front of her, in the way Haskins's jaw clenched and unclenched. It was the posture of a lawyer who had just learned that the foundation of her case was sand.

Finally, Lindholm gathered her papers, stood, and walked to the door. As she passed the defense table, she slowed.

For a moment, Elijah thought she might say something harsh. He braced himself.

Instead she stopped, looked down at him, and spoke in a voice stripped of all its courtroom polish.

"Where did you learn to do this?"

"A library, ma'am."

"That's what you told the judge." She almost smiled, but the expression failed. "I'm not asking for a joke, Mr. Carrington. I've been practicing law for eleven years. I've never seen a lawyer, with a license or without, do what you did in there."

"I only asked questions."

"Yes." She nodded slowly. "That's the part nobody remembers to do."

She walked out. The door swung shut behind her.

* * *

Judge Tolbert had retreated to his chambers, but through the half-open door behind the bench, Elijah could see a sliver of the room. The old man sat at a heavy desk with a pen in his hand, writing slowly, carefully, a word at a time, as if each one cost him something.